Spore Creature Creator Goes Asymmetric, Exports

A new patch for Spore has made a few interesting tweaks possible. Perhaps the most immediately interesting is the ability to build asymmetric creatures. No longer to features have to be applied in pairs, which enormously opens up the possibilities for creature design. And once you've designed your creature, as spotted by Offworld, there's now the ability to export it to your favourite Collada 3D modelling program to experiment with at your leisure.

Along with various bug fixes and tweaks, there's also some more in-depth changes applied to the Space Game, rebalancing the difficulty and reducing disaster rates across all difficulty levels.

But for the artistic, it's the asymmetry and ability to export to Maya et al that will be most attractive. Now by holding down A when hovering the mouse over the bit you want to move, it will become freed from any partner and be placed where you please. Or indeed you can hold A to select just one half of a pair from the menu. This applies across the creature editor and outfitter, as well as all vehicle editors and the UFO editor.

Once you've created something you love, those familiar with 3D modelling will be delighted to learn that using a new "cheat" made available in the patch, you can export the creature as a Collada model into Maya, or other similar applications. For all the details on this, check out Spore art director Ocean Quigley's blog where he explains it all beautifully. Currently this only works with creatures, with the hopes that vehicles and buildings will follow some time in the future. There's a step-by-step guide for creature conversion elsewhere on Quigley's site, here, along with some fantastic examples of what can be achieved.

Create anything gorgeous? Link us to it below.