So I want to take this post to not only share my progress, but to also give such a big shout to my teachers. I've been stuck and I'll admit that I've been kind of frustrated with the amount of work and learning involved in this project. So many things I haven't done before and there is a certain amount of time I have left. But my appreciation for Brent Wiley and Scott Cavanah could not be any deeper. Without them, this project would not be AT ALL the place where it is now. Thank you so so much. I hope someday I can give the same amount of guidance and inspiration to someone else, you guys rock.

So this is my progress.

Besides having a few shots rendered:

I also got Maya and Amira completely weight painted, which means I just need to finish animating them and rendering. I just need to finish Kai's eyelashes which are almost there, he is also done with weight painting.

With the eyelashes and eyebrows, it was quite the journey so it might get a bit technical. First I weight painted both the eyelashes and eyebrows, but it was so finicky, there was a significant lag and whenever I moved around the rig the eyelashes would not form well at all. Thanks to a new solution by my teacher Brent Wiley, the eyelashes now use a surface deformer and it attaches to their head and does not have any lag. It is also was interesting to learn that like a program, Cinema evaluates things in the object manager by the order it is presented in. As you will see in the video, by putting the body and head above the eyebrow and eyelash it evaluates correctly due to the priority it is presented in and works wonderfully. Now it's just animating and then rendering and animating and rendering.