There's been some hype around Spore Demo in recent weeks. Quite a lot of freaks enjoyed the early demo, showing off oppportunities for creature creation. I've spent some time trying to figure out some basic ideas they've used for it.

You can find their paper about quite advanced animation system planned to be published at SIGGRAPH this year and last year’s GDC talk (http://www.chrishecker.com/How_To_Animate_a_Character_You%27ve_Never_Seen_Before). Though, my interest was more in the area of critter’s mesh generation. I had the feeling it was somewhat inspired by all the sketch modeling papers of last decade. You can hardly create anything highly detailed and you are not given too much control over the process of mesh creation. But at the same time with all the basic operations you can create various kinds of characters and add details using provided templates. ( Read more... )

Tags: spore