Nightmares make good animations!

[Csion]

Last night I had a quick dream about some spiders crawling throguh my air vent...which I had to leave open that night because the AC is broken (Florida is too humid!).

anyways...when i woke up i figure that i could master my fear of spiders by making an animation of what i drempt (imagine that!). I got some of the spiders parts started..then i was working on the sufaces for the rest of the night (till 2:30am), which became the a problem. the fictional spides look alot like this one i found on google (amen) :
http://web.utk.edu/~extepp/profiles/insects/8eye-spider.jpg AHHHHHHH...*freakin' scared*

Can someone tell me how to make the skin carapiece suface?
I'm new to LW...and sufaces still baffel me!

-Jace

[Gettarobox]

from the looks of your reference photo i can tell you'll probably wanna get out the manual and read the part about translucency and diffuse. for the bumpy parts you might wanna make multiple bump map procedural layers or a custom one in a 2d photoshop type program. but if you are a noob you probably wouldn't know how to make a custom uv map. i guess it just depends how photreal you want to make it, that determines the techniques you would use.
but hey i'm apparantly a newb too. according to my user info. I feel a little more like an advanced noob though. because i have figured out how to do some of the tougher stuff like uv editing. however I must note that I haven't used lightwaves uv editing tools yet, but then from what i've been reading if you know how to use endomorphs and the weld tool you never need to edit your map because you can make one out of the actual geometry and then make it a planar uv map.
then morph it in layout into the original shape and then save it as a transformed and then open that saved version in modeller and then merge the points together and your done. so i might never use the lightwave uv editing tools.
well, I hope something useful to you came out of this endless garble i'm typing. ;)