An XML "recipe" for every Spore creature is stored on the Spore servers and is publicly accessible via the Spore API. The 2D-fier reads in this XML information and renders animated 2D creatures using Flash in a web browser.

In the figure above:
Top Left- 3D Spore creature
Bottom Left- Visualization of skin, limbs and part transforms
Top Right - 2D-fied creature!
Bottom Right - stylizing by swapping part palettes

Player Driven Texturing
Creatures have a particle based texturing system where players get to select combinations of effects such as stripes, dots etc. of various kinds. The morphology of the player's creature, color and effect parameters chosen combine to give a wide variety of textures. Buildings and vehicles have a region-swatch based paint-by-numbers scheme. For one-click painting both systems have preset themes.

Check out our Siggraph sketch on Player Driven Texturing!

Ambient Occlusion
128 shadows collected from lights distributed uniformly on a sphere



For buidlings and vehicles we distribute more lights in the upper hemisphere:

          


These are our first ambient occlusion tests. Presented here for historical interest
           

Baking
A key component of Spore is it's asset sharing functionality where players' creations can be easily "pollinated" across the web. Baking refers to the process of converting a compressed XML representation of a Spore asset into a fully textured, animated and optimized game model without interrupting game play. This includes a mesh simplification step, single compressed texture page generation with automatically generated UVs and ambient occlusion.

a) film noir                                       b) original                                        c) watercolor

Spore's Filter Chain system is a script-driven, real time, image processing toolset that is used to shape the final look of every frame rendered in the game. Here is a collection of fun effects generated with this system:

Andy Warhol Print for Spore Creatures (compress, threshold, colorize and tiled rendering)
                    

Film Noir filter (threshold and mix in noise grain)

Oil Paint filter (image space lighting with 3 lights, use "strokes" normal map to distort the scene)


Paper Cut-out effect
Adding uneven white outline (edge detect + noisy distortion texture) to oilpaint effect. Inverted color.

Crayon Rendering (Change edge shape using distorter texture and add noise grain)

After many iterations and approaches, I was able to develop a depth of field system for Spore that performed well on a wide variety of graphics hardware. I render the scene twice but split it into two parts in each render by offsetting the near and far planes of the viewer. The "far" scene is rendered into a texture, processed for atmospherics and blurring and composited with the "near" scene.

 

I developed the Buddy Browser to demonstrate the use of the Spore API. It is a neat little way of browsing Spore content by jumping from user to user through the social network of Spore "buddies". This app took 10 days to make from concept to deployment on Spore.com.

Try it!

This is yet another demo app for the Spore API. This one was built entirely in just 1 day! It shows off the Spore creature stat service.

Try it!

Another cool capture technology I added to Spore is a one button panorama capture tool. The panoramas can then be rendered in a Flash app I developed using Papervision 3D. Here's one such panorama:

Drag to rotate

      

Graduate Work at Carnegie Mellon University