We could definitely use a refresh in how the character models look, but I don't think it'd matter if the animation was really expressive and fluid. Which it's. Well, it's not. Frontiers's characters are just as static and stiff as always, and the art direction isn't doing it much favors either, if you ask me.
I think they could stand to refresh Sonic’s model. While there were some instances of well animated cutscenes, they’ve served their purpose at this point and compared to the art just look stiff and homogenized.
The model isn't bad, it's its utilization. Proportions, colors, texturing and shaders are in a good place now with Frontiers. The animation quality is what has been very stiff for a long time, up until Frontiers in a few spots. A new rig and model sheet of expressions, along with new guidelines for squash-n-stretch is needed more than an overhaul of the character design. Now the promotional model? That sucker needs some of those Frontiers updates.
Yeah, it's just the animations. Pay no attention to Ronald Mcdonald over here. Spoiler the soap shoes were like supposed to be bigger than his torso trust me bro Why the fuck would a character who likes to run ever wear giant cumbersome clown shoes for like 17 years in a row? (The regular shoes are kinda better it's just funny how hard they fucked up the soap shoes)
100% if this game had better animation quality people wouldn't be complaining about the models nearly as much. The models have issues, but many people don't necessarily have an issue with the model, just how it's used. Kany of the issues are really not very noticeable. They're a bunch of small things that add up to create a larger problem. The lack of muzzle curve muddying his silhouette, weird shaping of his spines, an allergy to eyebrows for some reason. Fix these and use more expressive animation and I'm sure many of the complaints would disappear. That being said, I do wonder if Frontiers will be the last game to use the current models, or even character designs as a whole. The entire game is themed around moving on from the past and embracing the future. I've always theorized that this was supposed to be a send-off to the current Sonic cast, and for the next game we'll have spanking-new designs. That's wishful thinking, though.
wow thanks ok guys pack it up we can't criticize it because cartoon He used to have smaller shoes that made more sense as running shoes. Those soap shoes are blatantly gigantified compared to SA2.
I came across this really cool fan render by @_OreoArt_ on twitter. I'd love if a future Sonic game could experiment with this sort of aesthetic. Spoiler: cool images
The Soap shoes don't actually seem that much bigger to me. It just looks that way because of how Sonic's legs are posed. They're more straight up and down, as opposed to in SA2 where they aren't quite as much. The shoes themselves are further forward in Frontiers, making them look larger. They do appear to have been elongated in Frontiers, though, and they do look comically large. Spoiler The reason this doesn't work for me is because, no he's really not. He's in a realistic environment, he has realistic textures, he has animations that are not very cartoony. Nothing else about his appearance in Frontiers conveys "cartooniness" besides his big ol' Soap shoes. It looks disjointed.
They aren't really that much bigger, it's just the difference goes a weirdly long way for me. This could just be my own personal SONIC'S ARMS ARE NOT BLUE, I just want muh sensibly proportioned Adventure shoes back.
Minor aspects of character design do matter. A well-designed character makes all the difference. Things like the size of shoes, the shape of his muzzle, the length of his quills - these are all minor attributes in a vacuum, but characters aren't designed in a vacuum. They are designed a cohesive unit. "It's the little things" applies to a lot more real-life situations than just character design. And I don't think anybody was arguing. There was a bit of unnecessary sarcasm (which I apologize for, by the way) but that doesn't apply to the conversation itself being had. It's not bad, or meaningless, to discuss these minor issues, because they're not entirely meaningless. As long as people are respectful there is no harm in doing this, and it should in fact be encouraged. In a healthy way, of course.
The current model looks kind of bad and should be changed. At least I wish they would get rid of the butt crack on his face.
The problem with Sonic's model currently is not that it looks horrible on the face of it, it's that it's rigid, and using these designs for this long has opened them up to be looked at closer. Complaints about muzzle curve or quill length or whatever are a bit silly on their own, but where they matter is in how Sonic is allowed to look at any given point. Part of this is how the animation and direction chooses to use it, but not all of it. Sonic's face should be able to morph to have a wider or slighter curve between his cheeks and eyes, because that's how faces work. Sonic's eyebrow buttcrack isn't innately bad, it's that it's permanently there, like his constant scowling expression in 06. Side-mouth is the same way. Not wrong to have it where applicable, but Sonic's face should be elastic enough that you can move his mouth wherever it looks best to place it within a scene. The CG animation have got this right for years, and only Rise of Lyric has ever done it correctly in-game (albeit by just switching to a totally different model, but whatever works). How much of this stuff is actually possible with the current model already? I'm not sure, I'm not an animator, but every fan animation I've seen with the Unleashed design, even when they are decidedly better-animated, has given me this uncanny valley quality, and I think it's because A. fans can't always tell when something is over-animated, and B. they're trying to make it do things it's not built to do. There's also just other stuff that they can do with a structural redesign to the characters. The size of Sonic's hands and feet (and how his limbs thicken as they reach into them) could be adjusted, Knuckles's head is really flat currently (his Boom cartoon design unironically has the best head and face of any Knuckles model), Tails is a bit too big overall (especially his torso), and Eggman's proportions are a little too even, which limits some of the gesture in his poses and styling. Also, the soles of Sonic's shoes should be red with white trim to better reflect the best design they ever had. I'm not sure about the texture details here, but I totally agree that the classic games made Sonic's design pop because you saw the red wheel his feet created while running. They need to bring that into 3D, both in color and the blur/stretch effect from SA1. Having a good 2D-style blur to the 3D models is something the series needs in general, even if the only attempt at it we have is Sonic 4. Anyway, the current character aesthetic isn't hideous or anything, but it's fair to ask for more after fifteen years.
The per-pixel motion blur they use does a pretty decent job at it Motion blur in the previous games tended to look pretty bleh but I think they look great in this one especially at 60fps. I think a convincing wheel of feet is possible with it without resorting to the tricks they’ve used in the past like in Lost World.
Nah, it's too realistic. The wheel-feet of the classic games was based around smear frames, and the only thing that's come anything close to looking like that is the way SA1 stretched Sonic's shoes at his highest speed.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting @jubbalub 's comments but I don't think we need a new design for Sonic - the core Sonic design post-Adventure is a perfect evolution of the classic design, retaining all the identify features of Sonic while just making him look a bit older. Although that design has been interpreted in a variety of ways through the years, 2D art of it has largely only changed in connection with different art styles or Uekawa developing as an artist. With that said, I do think the 3D models (using "Sonic's design" and "Sonic design conventions" more or less interchangably here), while largely fine, could do with a couple of tweaks here and there, some to the topology itself and some to the underlying rig. A big one is definitely the limbs - since seemingly Secret Rings/Unleashed, Sonic's limbs have had a "single" joint at the point of bending, compared to the bendy limbs used prior to that. These bendy limbs are still used in CG trailers and the comics and, imho, are better suited to fluid movements and the speed of these characters. Another cast-wide change I think should be adopted are muzzle shapes as they were pre-Heroes. Some characters come off worse than others here (Tails in particular is the poster child for this, while Knuckles has oddly kept his muzzle intact), but ultimate the flat muzzles take away volume from character faces and reduce design diversity and that's no good. Finally, make everybody's shoes look like actual shoes again. I think the gold standard for this is SADX's Sonic shoes. They've got an organic shape to them that, while stylised, looks fitting for such a garment, compared to the later takes, which look increasingly like rigid plastic that Sonic could probably use to stab someone, should the red mist descend. And none of this touches the core proportions of the designs because, frankly, they've been perfected since Unleashed. The Adventure games looked too squat at the torso while 06 went way too lanky everywhere, but we're in a good place now.
Eh, I think this design seems a bit too busy. Not a fan. It'd likely look like a strobe-y mess when running at high speeds too. I think I lean towards the red soles of classic or the standard grey Uekawa look. This is likely never going to be done by Sonic Team, I'd love it if they went the Arc Sys route and just avoided interpolation between keyframes and treated the models like 2D animations. That'd look pretty cool. Regarding the design overall, I'm mixed. I think the model is extremely well-made and is almost a platonic-ideal Sonic, it's just a bit boring and stale at this point. However, because it is such as solidly designed model, I think it's more likely that changing it would end up in something worse. I think tweaks to the textures and shading would go a lot further in revitalising the look of the series and characters.
