The big challenge for the last two weeks is how to get hair out of houdini and successfully into Maya. I tried a wide variety of ways, but the issue I kept running into was that houdini was sending out the hair as NURBS curves instead of actual geometry. This meant that Arnold could not render it, as the curves would not show up in the renderer. I looked for solutions in rendering curves in Arnold, but none of them had the look that we were going for. They were all far too stylized and 'thick' looking, taking away from the visual effect that houdini had for us.
Eventually, after reaching out to a colleague, I found out that the best way to get the hair out of houdini and into Maya was through an .ass file. After tweaking some settings and exporting this .ass file, I finally got a successful render into Maya. What was even better was that this .ass file could be textured directly in Maya, meaning that we didn't have to figure out how to get shaders to transfer over as well. We can tweak the color to look exactly how we want it to in the render engine without having to export it back and forth between houdini and Maya.
Alongside that, I have also been working on creating the armor in maya. I've created a low poly basemesh that will be later sculpted into a high detail version. I've also used marvelous designer to create cloth for an undergarment for the armor. It will be rigged to move with the body of George.