Maxis's senior art director Ocean Quigley has been posting a lot of concept art and in-game screenshots from Spore in the past month, sharing on his personal blog images of early creature textures and planet transformations.

He also has shared his non-work-related (but still very interesting) paintings and digital sculptures, along with screencaptures and details behind the art direction of Sim City 4, which he served as art director for, too.

As for the Spore images, I've picked out a few that I really like, accompanying them with Quigley's explanations behind the art and how they played into the final product.

This screenshot, taken from Spore's Creature phase, shows an unfortunate looking critter moments away from becoming another much bigger creature's lunch. Quigley turned up the depth of field effects for this still and others in this screenshot series, noting, "In-game, we tuned depth of field way back, people found it distracting, but for stills they really add to the sense of space."

The art director created this test render in Maya with an in-house exporter that outputs skinned, rigged meshes along with all of the textures. "Here I'm plugging all of those textures into Mental Ray's subsurface scattering material and using depth of field to make the creatures look like little realistic toys."

This art shows some of the patterns that the Maxis team was aiming for with procedurally texturing player-created creatures. He says, "In the course of figuring it out, I painted up this bunch of example patterns that we wanted to be able to hit. I wanted to get this level of structure out of our automatic skin painter, so that limbs, backs, fronts, etc. would be recognized and treated appropriately."

Quigley goes into more detail on developing Spore's system for texturing creatures automatically, working with Chris Hecker and Andrew Willmott on the solution. One challenge with the system was that it had to work on "all different sorts of creatures, no matter how many limbs they had or how fat or skinny they were."

Spore also needed a system that could "procedurally generate an essentially infinite number of planets", which could transform in different ways, changing from icy to overrun with lava, from dry to drenched, and so on. "This image shows a planet going through all those different states. The same landforms persist throughout. I was pretty happy with this series, it demonstrated that we could wrench a planet through all of these transformations and it would look good and represent its state clearly."

Quigley shares several videos, too, like this one of an early rig block experiment showing the transformation of building primitives. "The idea was that the player would be pulling on the handles effecting the transformations."

Here, you can see a view of all the celestial bodies above from a planet's perspective. Says Quigley, "I wanted to make the player feel like they were on a planet in space. Not just on a flat playing-field with a painted sky above, but actually on a planet, in a solar system, orbiting a star, with other planets visible in the night sky. Planets that you'd eventually be able to visit. I wanted the space above you to feel like a volume, not just a backdrop."

You can see more art and detailed explanations on Ocean Quigley's personal blog.