Creature Creator Pro

Create an unhealthy variety of weird and wonderful creatures in no time at all

Creature Creator Pro is a monster construction set. It’s designed to simplify the task of creating aliens, monsters, fantasy creatures and mutated humanoids, and it more than satisfies that brief.

The program is remarkably straightforward, so you won’t be wasting any time reading manuals. Each creature consists of 22 body-parts, which you can select from a library of 500 pre-constructed parts. The easiest way to do this is to click on the Random Creature button, which instantly creates a creature. There are five categories: male, female, manga, fantasy and insectoid. You can limit your creature to one of these categories, or mix parts from them all. The insectoid category has virtually no sub-elements in any case, and the female category is quite unimaginative – breasts, slender body and not much else. The most interesting category is fantasy, which is where you get wings, horns, extra arms, claws and more.

If you prefer a more hands-on approach, you can select each body-part individually, and assign the variants that appeal to you, choosing from a dropdown list of names. Having selected the parts, you can further refine them by modifying their dimensions in any axis, or tapering them.

Having constructed your creature, you can then export it in OBJ, 3DS or DXF format. Because there are no textures, it doesn’t much matter which format you use, so you can select according to the import options of the program you intend to use. Alternatively, you can buy a version of the program that plugs directly into 3ds max, Maya, LightWave or trueSpace for more immediate usability.

Creature Creator is definitely a time-saver. However, there’s still room for improvement: coloured body-parts would help visualisation, for instance, and even a degree of texturing would’ve really brought things to life. The fact the app only outputs bipedal humanoids is also a serious limitation, reflected by the limited range of Insectoid permutations. Extra legs, a horizontal body/thorax, and more diverse body features would’ve all helped.