Your not going to get proper outdor illumination with Maya's software renderer without alot of light linking and shadow tweaking. You need to use Mental Ray or it's equivalent to achieve accurate outdoor lighting. As far a character work is concerned, I think it looks fantastic , A++ . I'm not seeing the vertex shadowing mentioned. Mabe someone can point that out. I have no clue as to how more texturing can bing the model out better, and if you smooth out the seperated parts ( assuming that means more model work ) you going to add more polys to your model and your going to have to re-map your uv's. Anyhow, it's your project, and you do what you want. I still think it looks like a challlenge winner to me.