Portfolio update 2: Bella in Color!

OK second upload.  This one was a little trickier than the desert fortress not in terms of painting or anything that was pretty fun actually but going back to 2015 Maya broke a lot of my characters materials like the skin and hair shaders.  I think I will try and fix these at a later date but for now on to the next one :D

So for those of you familiar with my work the character in both of these shots is Bella from my Character design online course with Gnomon.  Since finishing the 10 weeks of modeling I have textured her and played around a bit more with the hair system which is just so cool I recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind the cost its really fast and can produce some great results.  Don't take these renders as an example somewhere between me actually building the hair in Maya 2016 and rendering it in 2015 a lot of the connections got messed up but check out this link to see what GMH2 is capable of GMH2 hair.
The background was a mini environment project I used to get a little more familiar with texture painting in Mari.  Painting a lot of basic models really let me get to grips with the layered workflow and integration with Maya.
There is a little bit of a story behind the piles of coins though.... A long time back I actually did a little gif of a pirate treasure chest filling with coins coins!!.  Try as I might I just can't get Maya to generate a cascade of primitive objects like you would imagine in a liquid simulation.  I have tried physical emitters but even with letting Maya run for like 45 minutes churning out one coin per second and calculating all the forces (it turns out you can only simulate these with spherical collier meshes hmm...) there doesn't seem to be a way to actually convert the resultant piles of coins into actual geometry.  There are a few scripts out there that promise this but I couldn't get them to work.  So the work around I used for the treasure gif a while ago was to create a lot of coins hovering in space and just drop them and let Maya churn away, much to her distress I am sure, working out all the collisions.  Still for this one there was just toooooo many coins.  Despite the long time it was taking to actually simulate the coins I was determined to find a way without actually placing each individual pile the long way.... Fast forward about 3 determined but ultimately fruitless hours and I finally bit the bullet and just did it the long handed way which only took like 20 minutes opposed to the several hours I had spent trying to do it a smarter way :p oh well live and learn!
For me there is still a tonne more I would like to learn about texture painting and material design I am slowly starting to piece it all together but there is still a ways to go.
It was so fun for me to take Bella through to a textured state, I hope you all enjoy the final look!
Thank you for reading this far :)