This week I've basically been tracking down and fixing problems that have come up with the fur. I worked on the ambient occlusion pass, and was able to lower the samples. This lowered the rendertime to ~75 mins per frame.

I also fixed the specular pass by using a more accurate shading model:

As you can see in the spec pass, theres some weird jittering. I've been trying to fix this for a while, as it's probably going to cause issues with the animation. This is caused by the normals reorienting themselves based on transformations. It can be fixed if the transformation is post copy, but we will be working with geometry that deforms itself... Here's the problem in a more basic form.

I started to try and composite the layers in houdini, to see how they're working. Turns out I'll have to go back and fix the shadow pass, as it is casting shadows based on the skin geometry, not the wires...