SO Character - Presentation & hand-in

In the last week of the project I started working on the rig. I wanted to do it in Maya, mainly because I haven't done it before and wanted to learn it. Setting up the rig with the human preset was not that hard, pretty similar to using the biped in 3dsMax. I found skinning much nicer than it is 3dsMax and quicker but half way though the process I realised that some vertices that I have already worked on kept resetting their weights and messing up the entire skin. I have tried looking for a solution but nothing that I did fixed it, the only answer that I found was that it is a bug in Maya and I should just restart the skin. Unfortunately, at this point I didn't have enough time to finish it until the deadline and I preferred to work on the presentation in Marmoset. I am a bit disappointed that I couldn't manage to finish the rig until the hand-in but I will do it until the summative submission. This time I want to take my time with it and make it nicer, because I found rigging this character more difficult as it has a lot of overlapped, hanging pieces of clothing and  I don't want to get any errors in my model caused by the rig and skin.
For the Marmoset scene, I tried having a similar lighting set up as in the concept. My main focus was to create interesting shadows and draw the attention towards the top of the character, but the current lighting set up is likely to change a bit after I pose the character. For the final presentation, I am planning to make some glowing smoke alphas for the katana to imitate the effect it has in the concept and add a backdrop in the scene, with maybe some mist/smoke or dust particles.