Eric and Chris,
Awesome! While I am away at the coast (I managed to grab a laptop) I'll be doing a lot of research since I can't do so much production other than shader writing.
The displacement map clarification is very much appreciated and as soon as I get back I will go and at least try to fix the map so it's more in tune to the default Blender value. As for using Cinepaint, since I am using Windows I only have an old version of that available but it will work for my needs in this case. Gimp is great for certain things but more and more it seems that it just is not able to handle our needs, so IF I do any texture work in GIMP it will later be fine tuned in Cinepaint. Honestly I was thinking about that myself and wondered why I wasn't using Cinepaint from the start (too used to GIMP and started to use on instinct). I think I should make this noted in the pipeline docs too.
I will look into the UV when I return too, I am not working on a 'production' model of the spider at the moment, just a local copy on my system so once I figure out the hair length method, and the HairDSO, I'll be Appending that to a new file.
So IF the Hair DSO is not fully operational by the time we get into animation, I think it still would be possible to use hair as long as the amount is lower than the default setting. From my own testing with the normal hair export it doesn't take that long, it only starts to choke up when parent and child hairs are set at the normal default values. If those are set below the default it does end up looking fairly decent.
Also I noticed that Aqsis is under feature freeze and that 1.6.0 P1 is being released on Moday? When this does happen is it recommended to take off any 1.5.0 builds and use the new 1.6.0 builds? In regards to that, how much change is there in compiled shaders? It's not THAT big of an issue but if there is no change between 1.5.0 compiled shaders and 1.6.0, it should just save time, if there is a good reason to recompile I will do so, otherwise I will just leave them alone (for now).