Well, the Spore Creature Creator has been out a few days now. It’s pretty fun!

I was really curious about the animation system, since that’s been the subject of several tech talks the last few years. I must say it works remarkably well, especially considering the number of bizarre creature shapes that are possible. Great stuff.

Longhorn Bullipede

Antadillo

Zog the Zig-Zag Frog

Eric Gooch of Insomniac has an excellent tutorial on Creating the Lighting for Resistance: Fall of Man. The best part of the tutorial are the “before and after” shots that show how each scene looks lit and unlit. A lot of people underestimate the importance of good lighting, but these pictures really help make it clear. Well worth the read!

Remember growing up with paper and crayons when you were a kid? Remember handing your doodles to your parents to hang on the refrigerator? Ah, fond memories. Kids and art may be timeless, but the methods sure have changed! A true child of the digital age, my little girl just made her first 3D model and asked me if I would post it on my blog. So here it is. 🙂

It’s a candlestick. Pretty cool, eh?

A new version of the AC3D texture monitor plugin is available! This version adds a “smart update” feature that prevents the same texture from being reloaded multiple times, even if you use the texture multiple times in your scene. The texture monitor now also ignores files who’s “last modified” time stamp has not changed on disk within the last 10 minutes, so textures you haven’t changed don’t get reloaded. This should make load times much faster, especially in large, heavily-textured scenes.

Enjoy!

Read about the texture monitor or download the file here.

This plugin adds displacement map support to AC3D. Displacement mapping is a technique that deforms the current geometry, displacing the vertices in accordance with elevation values stored in a texture map. This technique is useful for “painting on” details onto a very high resolution mesh.

Displacement maps can be painted with 2D art tools such as Corel, Photoshop or Gimp; or, they can be exported from 3D sculpting programs such as ZBrush or Mudbox. The AC3D displacement map plugin supports 8-bit grayscale and 16-bit red-green (POV-Ray format) displacement maps.

If you are new to displacement mapping, this tutorial explains the process in more detail.

Download the plugin. (Requires Windows XP, AC3D 6.2 or above.)