[Maximus3D]

As the topic says, the real trialversion is finally released. Go grab it, have fun and post your crazy creature creations here for us all to enjoy

http://www.spore.com/trial

/ Max

[Maximus3D]

I can jumpstart this thread with a couple of my first creatures





/ Max

[deadalvs]

i've been waiting for this game a long time ...


downloadin' ..

[jjs]

Max - I have a 7 year old son who is obsessed by lego bionicles and dinosausors etc.

I looked at the site and a nintendo DS game is out soon. He has one of those with bionicles and the usual fead the pet game - they have all died . He seems to just like shooting the monsters

What is the pupose of the game.

Jonathan

[Maximus3D]

Jonathan, i'll tell you more tomorrow. I'm off to bed now, but i just bought a full copy of the editor to get all the parts to play with. It's cheap, just 6 euro but well spent money.

So i created my version of the Spiderpig from the Simpsons movie



/ Max

[Bubbaloo]

Does whatever a spider-pig does...

[sandykoufax]

hehe, it looks very cute toy.

[Maximus3D]

Bubba: Hehe i see you know the song

Koufax: indeed, it'd be great to have these little critters crawl around on the walls at home instead of the normal spiders. A nice refreshing change

Now i pieced together this alien from the Aliens movies, sorta.. it kinda looks like them but still not exactly. Would be cool to have that long head like the real thing got.



Jonathan: If your kid likes to build stuff, as you mentioned he has Lego's and Bionicles then he might be interested in Spore because what the foundation of Spore is, is evolution. You start with very primitive cell based lifeforms which you should then help evolve in whatever direction it will take depending on the enviroment it's in. You can then help it evolve into creatures which eventually construct villages, and explore outer space and terraform these planets and evolve even more lifeforms on these. The game will be quite simple so kids should enjoy it as much as the complexity it offers is good enough to keep adults hooked on the game. You should check the videos on Youtube and other sites to really see what the game is about, it's difficult to describe here in typed words. Maybe let you son have a look at it, let him try the creature editor and see if it's something he thinks is fun.

/ Max

[KurtS]

It would be great if you where able to export the creatures to Maxwell...

[mtripoli]

It would be great if you where able to export the creatures to Maxwell...

As I recall from awhile ago when first seeing the public release info on this one of the points they made is that it is not a wireframe base, the whole thing is done with procedurals. This is one of the reasons it can run on a relatively slow machine and still get good performance. I don't know that the ability to output a 3D file is possible under these circumstances. Maybe they'll make this available somehow...

[Mihnea Balta]

The procedural stuff has to create triangles in the end because that's the only thing the video card can render.

There is a way to extract meshes from games, but as you might have guessed, it's fairly illegal to do it, and it's definitely illegal to use the results. :) It's called 3D Ripper DX. You run a game with this thing attached and press F12 to capture a frame. It comes with a Max plug-in which allows you to import the captured files. You have to know what FOV is used in the game, but it's easy to guess it in a few attempts (just try different settings until the meshes don't look distorted anymore; I think Spore uses 45 degrees). The tool will give you the meshes as they end up after the vertex shader runs, which means that if the object is animated, you'll see it as it is deformed by the animation (in other words, exactly as you see it in the game in that frame). Obviously, it can't show you the skeleton, bind pose or animation curves because each game implements those in its own way (and actually, Spore does them in a really cool new way, since it must animate characters made by players). It can only extract the common denominator, i.e. the final geometry.

Here is an FBX of one of my creatures.

[mtripoli]

Oh shit... it worked, first time... I selected the "save as obj"... it came right into Lightwave... trouble...nothing but trouble...