I’ve been watching the development of Spore, the upcoming universe-sim game by legend Wil Wright, for some time now, as have many millions of others. The release is coming up pretty soon, and they’ve just released a trial version of the game’s Creature Creature. You can download it for both Mac and PC.

The trial lets you make a creature using the game’s super-easy and intuitive 3D interface, and the results you can get out of it are quite striking visually, and also very complex. It looks pretty cool.

I’ve heard a number of puppeteers talking about using the Creature Creator as a pre-viz environment, to quickly get a sense of what their puppets will look like in 3D. I suppose you could use them for that, but I’m going to be the curmudgeon and suggest that won’t catch on. Is the interface powerful? Yes. Is it easy to use? Yes. So why don’t I think it’ll work? Well, aside from the fact that you’re only creating lizard-skinned creatures, without (so far as I’ve seen) the ability to add feathers, fur, or anything else, it comes down to character: the game engine will automatically animate the creatures you design, and while it’s amazing and technologically fantastic — the programming skills to make an engine that can dynamically manipulate, with skill and accuracy, creatures with a variable number of limbs is insane –  I don’t want the game to tell me how my new creature moves. That’s the puppeteer’s jobs, and one of the most fun parts of the process of building a puppet: you put it on for the first time, and you figure out exactly how the character operates, how he moves, how he talks, how he laughs, all of that.

It might be more accurate to say that I don’t think I’ll use it for puppet pre-viz, not that most people won’t.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for the game as puppet-design tool, I’m quite excited to play it, and I recommend everybody check it out.

You can download the Creature Creator Trial at: http://www.spore.com/trial