I am working on the hair right now actually, figuring it out since I have had little experience using the hair system in Blender but I quickly caught on. Last night, late last night, I had done a lot of testing on the spider itself, after a few tutorials I figured out that I can use a map to control hair "growth", that I can groom the hair as well. The hair as default came out of every surface, including the eyes, which looks less than stellar for sure, not only that but even when changing tangents to lean them back on certain parts like the legs it would lean in the opposite direction I wanted (up in this case). So later on tonight I will be finishing up these tests and hopefully produce the small fuzz that spiders have. One thing I did think about is also using some curves in a few choice locations, since spiders also have those weird long hairs here or there. How to link them to the mesh so it stays in place during animation is beyond me at this moment. I should be able to figure it out though. If not I am positive that between Dan and I we can get some kind of idea of how to accomplish that.
I also fooled around with fake SSS in Aqsis last night as well. That would need some work but it's possible and doesn't take nearly as long to render as I imagined, unlike Pixie when using ray traced SSS takes horrendously long time to render Suzanne at 800x600. I also did test renders of the SSS and hair system at HD resolution to see how long just the spider would take to render - avg time as 4000 seconds. Not sure if yet on if that is decent time, so I will be making note of these issues as I come across them.
