Starting Texturing Woes

I'm having some issues trying to decide how to texture this current project.  So I decided to re-look at my original idea of this character.   I figured I do this to revisit some of the ideas and reasons for why one texture might work better than another.  I played with painting colors in mudbox but it didn't feel like I was going exactly where I wanted for the creature.

When I first approached this character I felt like combining a bunch of elements from things that I was particularly interested in.  I felt like creating some sort of a marine cat like creature hence the tail.  At the time I was also interested in creature designs from the movie Avatar.  So I took some influence from the Thanator in particular the almost armor plated and very well defined musculature.

However I didn't want to take too much from the Thanator and make a completely alien so I compromised for a thick leather plating like back and a stronger wider body structure.  This is also why I took reference from real cats like lions, leopards, and panthers.  I chose these three is because the hair on lionesses, leopards and panthers shows more form.  Also I was still interested in a more tree like jungle cat as that is also somewhat like the Thanator again.  A similar environment to consider would be like around the Amazon river.

This gave me an idea coloring along with looking at how marine mammals and big cats are colored.  As a lot of cats are colored for camouflage I decided to use the color of the silt in the amazon and basic patterns from tigers and leopards as well as darker coloring on the top side and lighter coloring on the bottom.  For the back plating looked at some rhino skin references to get a better idea for how to texture the back plating.

However my problem now is to decide whether I want to add fur or not.  I have done some playing with basic fur attributes and they done look horrible but they aren't refined enough for what I want.  If I decide on using fur its going to require further research into much more advanced fur techniques.  

Other problems I've having is transferring work back and for between Mudbox and Maya.  Whenever I bring texture back from mudbox as extracted textures the bump maps change and lose definition and the painting layers wont export as one flattened file despite selecting options telling it to do so.  I'll have to do some searching to solve these issues.