So, the stumbling block I was running into with this project on Friday was creating the pile of coins around the treasure chest x3 My original idea of emitting them as particles wasn't working, so I ended up using a texture mapped plane for the shape of the mound, and then manually placed individual coins on and around it to pull off the effect.
I also fixed an issue I was having with the wing membrane simulation, so aside from the treasure chest missing texturing, I'm just a few tweaks away from kicking off the final render on this video =)