Saturday, September 13, 2008

SPORE rules!



Have you lassies and lads checked out this new rage? It promises to be real big. See for yourselves! Good bye Second Life! I couldn't believe I was doing this, a middle aged man with 'some' respect in the community... (probably lost it all by now). Anyhoo, you gotta download the trial version from here. The rest is childplay. The clip above I did in less than 5 min including the creation of the creature itself. I called it VJK Jr! What else? Oh, yes, my creature already mated and got three kids too. See them acting in the clip as well. A big happy family. Hilarious! I promise you, this thing is bound to be a real fav in families with grammar school level kids... not?

Check out this too that I exported to YT. Fun, innit?

On a serious note though. Imagine somebody created a 3D modeling package like the one used in Spore. If you ever worked with 3D modelers (Autocad, 3DS, and piles of others) then you can easily see the benefits of the Spore modeler above anything else on the market. Difficulty number one in all current 'classic' 3D packages is the counter intuitive ways they use to model 3D objects on 2D (flat) monitor screens. Spore has many qualities, but a I like three in particular (even above their real-time renderer with shadows and all, which is a darling as-is): 1) it has a 3D space intelligence and makes modeling on 2D flat monitors quite intuitive (this is also something you often find in other packages as well; I am talking about taking a library object and 'sticking it' on an existing one in order to create an extension. 2) uses libraries of pre-designed objects and offers enough parameters to alter their shape, and 3) MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL, it has extensive embedded rules of nature (either physical laws like gravity and inverse kinematics or rules of organic life and knowledge of functionality of organic parts). With packages like this, a future 'Toy Story' will take less than half the time to model , conservatively speaking.

Talking about these embedded rules, figure this: you build a creature's main body by defining the length of its backbone (pulling and pushing) and you then stick a pair of legs to it; the Modeler concludes via the necessary embedded code the kind of advancing movements the creature will be bound to do when using its legs, given its total shape and the position of the added legs with respect to the rest of the body and its center of gravity (navel). The designers of this modeling language (package) are, in other words, pretty smart cookies.

I hope they can use that experience to make a product for general purpose 3D modeling. It's definitely gonna be a winner.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

dude! spore is the best! i have all the patches u can geg for it! (galactic adventures, creepy and cut part pack, dr.pepper ea bot part promotion pack, and 2 mods) add me as a buddy on it! im pokepoke9!