The Spore Creature Creator Trial is free and is great fun. You can save, take pictures and movies of your creatures. And you can share them on the website. The only limitation is that there are only a few body parts to use and a few texture layouts. But the Creature Creator is so easy to use and so much fun, it’s worth the time even if you don’t ultimately buy the Spore Game.
Here are some of the creatures I’ve made in the last few days. Click on each one for a larger picture.
Here is a video captured of one of the creatures.
The Spore creature trial has a direct link to share your videos on YouTube. I’m not clear why I can’t hear the sound-track on my system, but I can hear it after I upload the video to YouTube.
Here is my list of shared creatures on the Spore website.
All except the first one were done from scratch using the trial software. The first one is an extensively modified creature supplied with the trial. You can share your creatures on the Spore website. I’m not yet sure whether those with full games can download and modify your creatures or not.
This software is a real breakthrough in the creation of animated characters. There are no skinning, boning and other tedious issues that need to be dealt with as you create a creature. And when you are done, all the animations work. Someday soon, perhaps, we will see a plug-in for environments like 3ds max that will allow this to be done. There is a creature creator from FXRSoft that is is very crude, but the code does not look recent. It’s not clear that it works with the latest version of 3dsmax. After trying the trial, the program only produces skins, no bones or animations, and there is no texture support.
Creature Labs produces a game called Creatures. Apparently the design of the creatures is based on some DNA style mechanism rather than a direct editing approach. However, the Docking Station does not run on Vista because it apparently requires 16bit color. The install FAQs says that to install it on Win XP you must run as administrator. So apparently this is a dead product. The forums are closed because there is nobody to act as moderator.
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