Bird Head - Maya Model

Using what I have learnt so far in my Maya tutorials at University. I have created the above model which I have been playing around with today. The model is made up of three different meshes being the head, eyes and eyelid. These meshes have then been mirrored to create a full head. Once I had a full model I played around with different ways of rendering feathers. On the right I've used a 3D feather brush preset. While it looks quite effective, it makes the character more expensive to render and also harder to animate. I then tried using an inverted bump map on the head on the left. This method is much less expensive and is commonly used on models for video games as characters can be rendered in real time. What the bump map does is creates a seemingly 3D texture by overlaying two images on top each other and shading them independently. The bump map on my character uses the same texture twice but with one of the textures uses inverted colours.  I'm pretty happy with what I've managed to do in Maya so far. My modelling skills still need a lot of work, plus I still need to learn how to rig my characters.