A few days ago on our forums, Gil let us know that a few excellent demo videos from the SIGGRAPH - which is short for Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques (a bit of a stretch, indeed) - had been put up by a user on GamingSteve.com. If you haven’t seen them yet, we’ve uploaded them to our servers for you to download. Don’t be afraid at the large filesize, they are well worth the view!

> “Creating Spherical Worlds” explains in technical terms how the Maxis team created the beautiful looking planets we see in Spore. It has some amazing screenshots of a wide range of terrains, including icy, temperate, and volcanic lava planets. There are even some strange worlds, such as a baseball shaped planet! If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, the demo is in the middle.

> A demonstration on the texturing system Spore uses, which is unique to the game. There is the requisite Creature editor show, as well as a section featuring the more rarely seen Building editor. Both look absolutely excellent, allowing the player to easily create any sort of object imaginable without spending a tedious amount of time on it.

> An in-depth explaination of how the creation tools work in Spore. A creature or vehicle is made up of various smaller objects called rigblocks, which the player can easily modify in shape or size to construct incredibly unique creations. The big attraction in this video is the vehicle editor, another part of the game we haven’t seen much of. It can create amazingly realistic vehicles, which is a bit of a contrast from Spore’s more cartoon styled creatures. This is definitely something that will be very entertaining!