Spiders Spiders Everywhere

In my clothes and in my hair. Now that I'm done with Mudbox it is time to start piecing everything together in Maya for the final renders. As usual Maya is throwing its toys like it'll win something but one must press on.

I have a lot of respect for the Dirtycube now. Once I discovered the wonders of 1.7 million polys I was away laughing. Most of the textures I created came from combining different stencils from the default set plus one or two of my own. If I was to attempt this project again I would certainly look into obtaining my own photographs to turn into textures. Alas time has never been on my side (personally, I think it enjoys the competition).
Strangely enough whenever I exported the normal maps to put into Maya, Mudbox would cheekily "calculate tangential something-or-other" without my consent and my model ended up looking like this after. I didn't vote for this Mudbox, what are you doing? I looks like my spider was left on a rock to sunbathe and forgot to return to the water after a week.

I suspect that these tangents are the culprits for the next few rendering abnormalities;

Turns out no displacement map is better than anything else. These variations all come from playing with the alpha gain values. I found the formula for converting between Mudbox and Maya but unfortunately nowhere tells where to get the original value.

So yeah, I'll have to be happy without it. Unfortunately the detail on the arms isn't coming out too well. Then again the only thing that really makes a brown recluse's legs interesting texture-wise are the hairs but the swimming recluse doesn't have hairs on its legs.

These images are renders from Maya using my high poly normal map on my low poly mesh. It doesn't carry over the detail as well as I would have liked so I will continue to experiment. I have yet to apply an ambient occlusion map and I also will test bringing my high poly model directly into Maya to see if it will crash my computer or not.
I've also rendered out my low poly turntable. For whatever reason certain frames had graphical errors on them so I have a bit of re-rendering to do before it is perfect but that won't take long. One thing that didn't work no matter what I tried was rendering a surface shader that showed the wireframe of my low poly model. The tutorials online all agree on the same method and yet I get no wireframe...? Another thing I will be ditching is the complexity of the tail. The nCloth and spline combo was rejected by Unity consistently so I decided to remove both from the model entirely. It does make the tail look awkward but it is better than not having a model at all. There is the possibility that I could still create the webbing in a static high poly render but that would only come as a final touch. I would rather have the base expectations of my work done before trying anything as volatile as that.