As everyone should know by now, the latest Spore patch added several new features to the game, such as the possibility of riding vehicles in adventures, in-built asymmetry for all editors, and a cool cheat that exports 3d models of your creatures in a format readable by most 3d modelling programs.

You can get more detailed info here, but to make it work you just need to enter the creature editor, go to Paint Mode and type “ctrl+shift+c” to enter the cheat “colladaexport“.

That saves a collada file of your creation in the same folder your creatures are saved. You can then import it into a program such as Autodesk Maya. For those of us that don’t have the skills to use or the access to Maya, I highly recommend a little program called FX Composer, that can be downloaded here.

The FX Composer isn’t as good as Maya, but it does let you do some cool stuff, like changing lighting effects…

… switching textures …