Gamers around the world have been downloading the Creature Creator and building their own animated characters for the upcoming video game Spore, the latest innovation form SimCity creator Will Wright’s Maxis. Members of the Maxis team will be at SIGGRAPH 2008 to discuss the techniques behind the animation development for the internet-based game that allows users to create a species of creatures, grow them from cellular to full-scale life forms, and share their evolved creatures with other players interactively worldwide. Spore will launch worldwide in September.
As part of the SIGGRAPH 2008 Technical Papers program, Spore experts will present their latest research, Real-Time Motion Retargeting to Highly Varied User-Created Morphologies. The paper presents an inside look behind the animation authoring tool that makes it possible for users to create the Spore creatures and bring them to life.
‘As the field of computer graphics matures, we will continue to see graphics practitioners take on novel challenges that were not even considered just a few years ago,’ comments Greg Turk, SIGGRAPH 2008 Technical Papers Chair from the Georgia Institute of Technology. ‘The modeling and animation techniques used in Spore will inspire others to think more creatively about user-created content in computer games.’
The authoring system used in Spore animates characters whose shapes are unknown to the animator since the bodies are user-generated. The authoring tool allows animators to visually describe motion using familiar posing and key-framing methods. It records the data in a body-independent form, preserving both the animation’s structural relationships and its stylistic information. During gameplay, this motion information is applied to specific characters to yield body-dependent pose constraints that are supplied to a robust and efficient inverse-kinematics solver.For complete details about this or other Technical Papers presented at SIGGRAPH 2008, visit www.siggraph.org/s2008/attendees/program/?type=papers.
SIGGRAPH 2008 will bring an estimated 30,000 computer graphics and interactive technology professionals from six continents to Los Angeles, Calif. for technical and creative programs focused on research, science, art, animation, gaming, interactivity, education and the web. The confab will kick off on Monday, Aug. 11 and will continue through Friday, Aug. 15 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Registration for the conference and exhibition is open to the public. More details are available at www.siggraph.org/s2008.
