Sonic 2 Enhancement Theory

The idea to make this came into my head a few weeks ago, and I decided to give it a try.
In making it, I was able to test out a few of my own graphics theories, and it has worked better than I thought it would.

The idea started out simple. I would record gameplay (using input recording) of a level in some Genesis game, naturally I inclined towards Sonic. After recording gameplay of Hill Top Zone, I would render separate video files. Each one is lossless and renders only one of the drawing layers. In this case, I separated the background, foreground, and sprites.

Then in After Effects, I converted the solid color backgrounds to transparent. Thus I had a legitimate composite to work with and lots of flexibility. I started experimenting and came out with some nice bloom simulation, enhanced backdrop, and even filtered motion blur into the video.

Thanks to someone awesome here on Retro, I was shown what hex to edit to disable the music in the Sonic games, so I was able to render the sound effects separately as well. I remastered the sounds, added whole new ones, and rendered this with my own remastered version of Hill Top's theme, all designed with the animation in mind.

After some satisfying renders, I went a step further and started adding my own visual effects to the video. For this to work I had to do a lot of tedious, manual camera animation. Maybe there's a better way. =___=
After many rerenders and sorting out little mistakes, I end up with a really interesting gameplay video lol. I learned quite a bit making this and will be applying the knowledge to future projects.

This really begs a question though. Considering we have, you know, full access to the Sega Genesis drawing mechanisms and all the graphics within the Sonic roms, and are also able to access position registers and what not, couldn't some kind of post processing pipeline be integrated into an emulator? I would sure like to see the original Sonic games with bloom and vector blur lol.

And now the video in question. Please give your feedback on the video itself and what other ideas you may have.

 

I did two different things for bloom.
On the foreground layer, I used Stylize>Glow, set it to white, then used the same alpha map that masks the image over the glow. That way the glow wouldn't spill over the edges (similar to the "inner" setting for glow in other progams, strangely absent from AE), giving the effect of a very bright sky. I also used a mild Glow filter on the semi-final composite, for color bleeding. I animated both glow filters to zero effect when Sonic enters the caves.

As for motion blur, used Time>Timewarp filter. With pixel motion turned on, it attempts to interpolate frames. The effect has its own motion blur filter, which I used separately on the foreground and sprite layers. At 60 fps, the motion blur is a lot more effective, but the render time was frustrating, resulting in the semi-final composite taking over three hours to render.

 

I feared I did overdo the bloom, but I was also concerned anything less would be too unnoticeable, and might as well not have been added. The background blurring was not random. It was indicating the transitions in and out of the cave. Did you notice the music changes along with it?

I was concerned this would be viewed as just goofing off with AE filters, but I'm happy to see people notice this took competent effort. I did put a lot of work and detail into it. I know better not to be another one of these.

I do greatly respect the original aesthetic quality of the games, but if everyone had a mentality of "just don't mess with it", Sonic Retro would just be another site to argue about Sonic 4.

I did want to anti alias the graphics but could not figure out how. : (

Thanks for your critique.

 

Yeah I probably should have clamped the brighter areas lol.
I did not plan to do this for any other stages or games. This was mostly an experiment to hone some skills and test ideas. For everthing else I dream of, I expect Sonic 2 HD to fill the bill.

Eeeeh maybe. I really like how it is now though.

Thank you very much.

 

Thanks. Sonic 2 HD is free to steal from this all it wants. : D

 

Thanks.
Can't blame that fact about sound though, I would rather see a good animation silent than a good animation with crap sound. Sound is my best subject, so I always do a 110% job on anything sound related.

The spindash trick appears to be an overlooked quirk in Sonic 2. I also hilariously exploited it in S2 Retro Remix, seen here.

 

I considered this and almost did it. I changed my mind because the transition would have been too messy without using a series of masking effects. The background blur is meant as refocusing the camera, not necessarily light exposure.