How to export Spore creatures to Maya

Here's how to use Spore to export a 3D Collada file of your creature:

First, get a creature. I'm using Jomeaga's creature "Recruit", because it's cool looking and asymmetrical (that's the other major new feature in Patch 5)


Load it up in the appropriate editor:

Go to paint mode, so you can see what it'll look like textured, then open up a cheat window by pressing "control-shift-c"

Type in colladaexport


Agree to the EULA, and the cheat window will output something like this:

The exporter will create a collada file (a .dae file), along with the specular, diffuse and normal textures. It will place them in your “My documents/My Spore Creations/Creatures/” directory

Now you can load it up in any 3D application that supports Collada. The plugins for most standard 3D applications (Maya, Max, Blender, Modo among others) can be found here:

I'm going to load it up in Maya (Spore is Z-Up, so you should probably set Maya accordingly)
And you'll see that the a basic material is already set up for you:

In addition, the character's rig and skin weights come through, so you can pose and animate it.
Here's a render using the basic material:

But nothing's keeping you from using the textures in more sophisticated ways, and making it as fancy as you want to:
(click to enlarge)

update: a couple more pictures, because it's kind of addictive once you get started:
(click to enlarge)


(click to enlarge)

Update: You can see a little test animation here.

Another update: You can see a gallery of creature renders here.