Brian,

It's probably something that could use a good tutorial, but here is what I did for the glider in the Anything Grows and bones tutorial. You can see the AGro and bones tutorial at

http://www.digitalcarversguild.com/tutorials/agrobone/index.htm

1. Modeled the creature using the VM, with lots of help from Project Gemini.
2. Sliced it up in the VM to seperate named meshes using disconnect and then cut and paste. There may be an easier way. I also named polygons the exact same as the seperate meshes. Some things like the named meshes, some like the named polygons so it's useful for them to match.
3. I set all of them to a reasonable mapping mode depending on the shape.
4. I exported it as an OBJ and use Mapping Magician (just do a search on google) to normalize and layout the UV space. I liked the way it allowed me to resize the various mesh parts better than UVMapper does.
5. Saved and reimported into Carrara. Also saved a template file.
6. I then built a few mixer textures for transitions (like skin to lips, lips to mouth) and used those to texture the object in Carrara using some of litst's shaders as a starting point.
7. At this point the bones made it look terrible because the procedural textures would change as it animates so for one last step, I exported it back out to OBJ and had it create textures from procedural shaders. It took a long time, but when it was done, I replaced the procedural shaders with a single texture.

Good luck,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D extensions for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins