Thank you ocularb0b and Jörzi… and no, i didn’t use Lightcuts for this scene, just regular tools and features… the only fancy thing i did was to set an area light (with shadows activated) pointing up bellow the tarantula to fake light bouncing off the white floor.
I did it mainly for testing Blender hair particles, a little bit of UV mapping and some basic rigging. That’s why i din’t worry about scenario… But yes, i plan to do it in the future, i plan to do an animation, and yes, maybe i’ll create a “victim” ;)… But it will not be soon. Probably i’ll wait until Durian Blender version to take advantage of possible new features like GI or micro-polygon displacement.
Thanks. I just did UV mapping with a lot of procedurals (i avoid A LOT using bitmaps), the only bitmap was on the thorax. I think the “secret” for getting good results is setting materials as realistic as possible, hair has translucency, colors were very carefully set, you don’t have to be affraid to use a lot of hair, i always try to put realism over speed and phisically “correct” concepts over tricks or textures or paints or whatever, i always use raytraced shadows and all muy work now takes gamma and exposure concepts into account. Also, take as many different reference images as you can, some images will give you ideas that others don’t.
Years ago i’ve had a couple of tarantula “pets” myself so i know how they look and behave, i also googled for images to have better references… Modeling is far from perfect or anatomically correct but is OK for testing, and i wasn’t intending to get any specific species, just a good tarantula-ish look… colors actually remember a wolf spider.