I’ve been waiting for Spore to launch for three years. Last week, EA released a demo of the Creature Creator, and I find it to be totally sublime.
It’s like Baby’s First Maya, as it makes it trivially easy to shape, texturize, and animate original creatures. You start with a blob of flesh with a spine, at which point you come up with the basic silhouette by dragging the individual vertebra into position.
A drop menu treats the user to dozens of creature appendages, maws, claws, and incidentals to choose from, each contributes a statistical value to how that creature will survive in the world.
The editor makes intelligent guesses as you build your creature by aiding with symmetry. When painting the skin of your creation, the editor provides harmonious gradients to the base colors you’ve selected before. In effect, the editor helped me do a better job than I thought I could.
By far the most impressive feature is the “Test Drive” mode, in which your creature springs to full animation. You can there induce it to move around, display emotions, and do a little dance. Unless you took the design to an outrageous extreme, it all moves naturally and expressively. Ears fold back with anger and perk with interest. Eyes squint and flutter coyly.
Post a Comment