[Polygon Jim]

Glove textures are something you only expect out of high-grade CG renders. Which is the only place the glove textures and such are ever found, incidentally.

Secret Ring/Black Knight/Mario and Sonic Olympics/Unleashed use cloth detail in the textures. I believe All Stars Racing does as well, but I don't feel like ripping the texture again to check.


Secret Ring/Black Knight/Mario and Sonic Olympics/



Unleashed

[ICEknight]

From those pics and Sonic's current look we can conclude that 3D Mario is just 2D Mario sligthly adapted to look better in 3D, while the current 3D sonic was not just adapted but changed from what he used to look like back in the day, in both 2D and 3D.

They shoud have never done that, in my oppinion. They just destroyed a perfectly good character that won't come back even for the supposed sequel to his adventures.



EDIT: Even Mario's soles have stayed practically the same since the early 90's. It's obvious Nintendo has tried to stay true to that classic design.

This post has been edited by ICEknight: 17 May 2010 - 04:47 PM

[Solaris Paradox]

From those pics and Sonic's current look we can conclude that 3D Mario is just 2D Mario sligthly adapted to look better in 3D, while the current 3D sonic was not just adapted but changed from what he used to look like back in the day, in both 2D and 3D.

They shoud have never done that, in my oppinion. They just destroyed a perfectly good character that won't come back even for the supposed sequel to his adventures.



EDIT: Even Mario's soles have stayed practically the same since the early 90's. It's obvious Nintendo has tried to stay true to that classic design.

Mario had soles in the early nineties? I never saw them...

Bah, I still prefer Sonic's modern design. In Adventure 2 and Unleashed, anyway.

Secret Ring/Black Knight/Mario and Sonic Olympics/Unleashed use cloth detail in the textures.

Oh, I know, it's just that they never seem to go out of their way to make the gloves look any more "threaded" than the rest of the model. In Unleashed, for example, they're pretty much just flat white. It's only the CG that goes that extra mile. Not that the in-game model had to, with such an awesome lighting system behind it.

This post has been edited by Solaris Paradox: 17 May 2010 - 04:49 PM

[ICEknight]

Mario had soles in the early nineties? I never saw them...

[Solaris Paradox]

Mario had soles in the early nineties? I never saw them...

Ahem. The, um, bottoms of his feet, I mean.

...

Wait, sorry. I forgot about Super Mario 64. Never mind, carry on.

[Scartillery]

It is true. Even his blue is inconsistent to a degree where we can plainly see it's a totally different type of blue. His shoes have changed; the shape, the straps (an added yellow buckle), the bottom of them in recent games, everything about Sonic has changed at some point or another, save for the basic template, which of course bounds what is Sonic together.

Sure thats fine, but the blue they used changed from S1 to S2. Then it changed again from S2, to S3&K.
They changed the tinge in order to stop Sonic from blending into the background.

The 1998 redesign did more good than it did harm. All they did was make him taller and more althetic in appearance, lengthened his quills, and gave him green eyes.

It is as I've said before. The artists behind Sonic, felt they neede to modernise/improve Sonic's model. Some people out here seem to think the new Sonic model looks atrocious and ugly. Look at it again. It doesn't. Apart from a few odd facial expressions, he looks fine. In fact he looks better than he did before, in my opinion.
Some people argue that he doesn't look "cute" anymore. He wasn't supposed to look cute. He was meant to look cool. Relook at the original concept designs by Oshima.

We need to move on for god's sake. The design isn't "bad". The models may have been subpar in a few games, but the artwork has remained the same for nearly 10 years.

Examples:








THIS is the new Sonic design. The models in-game change as the developers improve their modeling skills.
The artwork has remained largely the same.

[Azukara]

Honestly, the SA1 art looks better than the later modern art IMO; especially the one you posted. It fits more of what you were talking about with being basically classic Sonic but with green eyes and somewhat taller in the spike and leg area.

The others look too stylized and is Uewaka's fun time taking Sonic and making him annorexic, rounding everybody's shoes, making limbs and appendages even longer than necessary and overdoing the "edgy shading". It's a good thing Unleashed's model is about as on the modern scale as the SA1 artwork shown above.

[Blue Blood]

Too bad that piece of SA1 artwork has been edited. Here,


Sonic's design has changed slwly since Adventure. Bar 06, he started to look much calmer. Softer, if you will. There's less focus on edgy and more on nice-guy. Not a complete change 100% of the time, but it's true.

[Azukara]

SA1's swirly style was neat because it was like a crazy artsy take on the Sonic designs (like most Dreamcast games like Jet Set Radio and Samba de Amigo; which were also rather artsy). However after taking the style and trying to straighten it out, it just looks pretty freaking ugly. The Sonic on the boxarts to SA2 and the Advance series are true offenders at looking like they made it a little too edgy. Channel's doodles were improvements but not too much better.

tl;dr:

Classic Sonic with no artsyness = Fine
Classic Sonic WITH artsyness (S3D JP for the Saturn) = Ugly
Modern Sonic with artsyness = Fine
Modern Sonic without artsyness = Ugly

This post has been edited by Azukara: 17 May 2010 - 06:15 PM

[Mr. Mash]

It is as I've said before. The artists behind Sonic, felt they neede to modernise/improve Sonic's model. Some people out here seem to think the new Sonic model looks atrocious and ugly. Look at it again. It doesn't. Apart from a few odd facial expressions, he looks fine. In fact he looks better than he did before, in my opinion.
Some people argue that he doesn't look "cute" anymore. He wasn't supposed to look cute. He was meant to look cool. Relook at the original concept designs by Oshima.

I guess it depends, personally I think this;

And the idle animation on the sonic 4 site look pretty cute, no? However, I'm not sure if it's the same model or what, but when he looks like this;

I think he looks real cheesy and smug.

...And as for the whole artsy cel shading thing

I...I... kinda... like it (In this instance)

[Introversive]

...And as for the whole artsy cel shading thing

I...I... kinda... like it (In this instance)

The way he's drawn in that game, he almost looks just just like classic Sonic if he had green eyes, was slightly taller, and I assume soles. Something like that (with higher polygon count of course) would have been my ideal model for Sonic 4 to use. Since the game seems to happen right after Sonic 3&K, it would make more sense to give him a design closer to his more youthful classic design. I always thought of the classic design as young Sonic, while the modern design is teen Sonic.

Unless if there's an official source stating that Sonic 4 takes place like perhaps a month or so afterwards to give Sonic some time for his body to change, otherwise, I'll assume that Sonic must have been in that plane without any food at all for a long time after he dropped Knuckles off at Angel Island.

[Solaris Paradox]

I just say to hell with explaining shit and assume he always looked like Modern Sonic, personally.

[dsrb]

We need to move on

I just say to hell with explaining shit

Everyone, savour this moment—before more repeated, painstaking analyses of various minutiae, complete with huge images and pyramid quoting.

[Solid SOAP]

They tried to adapt Sonic to a more realistic and "edgy" setting in SA2 and Sonic '06 and as a result, they changed the model in ways that didn't need to be changed (Ridiculously long legs, realistic looking shoes, cheesy grin, darker shade of blue, etc) which "ruined" Sonic for them. However, I don't see why because one or two games made Sonic look like more of an olympic track runner than a cartoon hedgehog, that means he looks that way in every game. Sonic in Unleashed looks more or less exactly like his classic form but with slightly longer quills and green eyes. There are other slight modifications that are too minimal to state, obviously, as there are with Mario's current design, but when you break it down Sonic is still a short and cute little hedgehog in Sonic Unleashed, which is what he should be. He looks great in that game and I'm tired people saying "NEW SONIC LOOKS LIKE SHIT LONG LEGS SHIT EATING GRIN I HATE IT" then procede to post a picture of art from Sonic Adventure, which came out over 9 years ago. This is Sonic now:



Not this, this, or even this. You guys are ridiculously butthurt over a design change that isn't even relavent to Sonic now. Constant complaints about shit eating grins, SOAP shoes, long legs, etc, get tiring after a while when said design changes aren't even used anymore. I own a Sonic plush toy that is supposed to represent classic Sonic. I swear, if they gave him green eyes he'd look exactly the same as Sonic does in Sonic 4 or Sonic Unleashed.

[Solaris Paradox]

Well, if you want to represent this accurately you really should show his final model (which is basically the same but with higher poly count and a slightly more extreme expression), but yeah, he looks good now.

And according to Polygon Jim, Sonic 4 uses the exact same model.