Update: Guide to Spore Creatures in Blender, a fabulous tutorial made by sporum user Eochaid1701.

How To Export Spore Creatures to Maya
A guide from Art Director Ocean Quigley

Here's how to use Spore to export a 3D Collada file of your creature:

First, get a creature. I'm using Jomeaga's creature "Recruit", because it's cool looking and asymmetrical (that's the other major new feature in Patch 5)



Load it up in the appropriate editor:


Go to paint mode, so you can see what it'll look like textured, then open up a cheat window by pressing "control-shift-c"

Type in colladaexport



Agree to the EULA, and the cheat window will output something like this:


The exporter will create a collada file (a .dae file), along with the specular, diffuse and normal textures. It will place them in your “My documents/My Spore Creations/Creatures/” directory

Now you can load it up in any 3D application that supports Collada. The plugins for most standard 3D applications (Maya, Max, Blender, Modo among others) can be found here: http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=collada

I'm going to load it up in Maya (Spore is Z-Up, so you should probably set Maya accordingly)


And you'll see that the a basic material is already set up for you:


In addition, the character's rig and skin weights come through, so you can pose and animate it.


Here's a render using the basic material:


But nothing's keeping you from using the textures in more sophisticated ways, and making it as fancy as you want to:






Update: Added Ocean's movie of Recruit animating


You can find more fancy renders in the gallery at the bottom of the tutorial page here.

can you upload the textures and positions to be seen in it's png?

Is there something that would allow you to use this in blender? I don't have much mpney but still want to be able to pose creatures.

Blender can import Collada stuff. How well it works for this, I haven't tried yet, because I'm on Mac. It looks like they have the texture maps from the game, tho.

K I will try it. I'll post when I find out.

Since you seem to be on PC, could you please do a Collada export on my Squiddy, so I can see this wonder for myself? If you could just send me the file, because I don't know when the Mac patch will be ready.
http://www.spore.com/sporepedia#qry=usr-Eochaid1701%7C2267376995%3Asast-500258551433%3Apg-20

This thing is like a sig maker's dream XD.

It comes through with the rig as well? *slashes animation time in half again* Thanks for the links to the alternate Blender plugins as well, I'll give them a shot. The one I used told me that they were .dae 1.5s

EDIT: My bad, they're the same plugins

*sigh*

If only I had maya

theludicrous wrote:*sigh*

If only I had maya

I am looking in on how to do it iwth Blender.

Ok I downloaded the plugin, I imported my creature should it appear or do I have to do something more before I can use the creature?

Falthron wrote:Ok I downloaded the plugin, I imported my creature should it appear or do I have to do something more before I can use the creature?

Wait, what plugin did you use??? Did you not get an "Import failed, check console" error? If you DID get it in, sometimes .dae s come in notoriously big, so fully zoom out and change the clipping on it.

scozdawg wrote:

Falthron wrote:Ok I downloaded the plugin, I imported my creature should it appear or do I have to do something more before I can use the creature?

Wait, what plugin did you use??? Did you not get an "Import failed, check console" error? If you DID get it in, sometimes .dae s come in notoriously big, so fully zoom out and change the clipping on it.

Here ya go http://sourceforge.net/projects/colladablender/

I have opened the .dae file but It comes out blank.

Yeah, I have those plugins, didn't import for me...

...but what did work for me was using the fre autodesk FBX converter to change the .dae to .fbx, .fbx to .3ds... will post screenie soo

Linkie plox With this on our side we can create animations for our advenutres