Maya Variation Shader Shell query

Coding
1

I am trying to bake hair planes from a nHair mesh. The problem is there is no variation in the strands and so all the strands look the same. I am trying to create variation by giving each shell a separate material (Any better ideas would be amazing!).

Now I need to know

  1. How to query the poly shell of an object
  2. How to create and assign a material to the selected faces.

Any help is much appreciated.

Regards
Dev