Ocean Quigley, Maxis's senior art director, has kept up his postings of Spore artwork and in-game shots since we last featured them.

One of his latest additions is this realistic creature constructed with the company's in-house exporter, which outputs "skinned, rigged meshes along with all of the textures (normal maps, specular, diffuse, gloss, etc)," then rendered with Mental Ray. "I love making them look like little physical beasties!" says Quigley.

These Cthulhoid renders are based on a Spore creature fashioned by custom toy designer Hellopike, and it looks like a real toy itself!

(Of course, you can pay to have your Spore creature sculpted into a custom figure using a 3D printer right now - here's a recent review with lots of nice pictures!)

Even so, many collectors would pay good money for a figure like this if it had _this_ much insane detail: