Well you have a point... At the same time, you can ask Jon Burton where the models used for Sonic in Sonic 3D Blast's renders came from (I'm sure he wouldn't mind) and resolve this argument.
More then likely the 3D blast model was made in the US without reference to the sonic 3 stuff, that whole america neesd edgy sonic stuff they tried to do.
There's also a 3D model seen in the Japanese Sonic Spinball commercial. Released there in December 93 so the commercial was probably made around the same time as the Sega UK proto.
Edit: nevermind. I was mistaken. Anyways, it's hard to choose one over the other when one is finished and, well, the other isn't. It's hard to tell now, but back then 3D computer rending was an intoxicating invention that promised to get better and better with no plateau in site. Even I pooh-poohed DreamWorks horse movie for being 2D when it seemed at the time to be so thoroughly antiquated by that point. Of course the 3D hegemony is unquestioned and I'm more than a little sick of it.
Do you think they'd use programming to convert to sprite or they did it by hand? Because that 3D Blast model has a bunch of small differences to the Sonic 3 one, including: thicker legs, the ear facing the camera being larger and at a different angle, the pupils being more capsule-shaped, the texture on the stomach being larger, the arms being longer. These differences would make sense if the spriting for the title screen was done by hand with the model as a reference, or if the model was edited and then converted, but not so if the conversion was completely automatic via a script.
I'm sure that Sonic 3 model has been repurposed plenty of times, just edited from its original state. Let's not forget the sonic 2 special stages are a result of pre-rendering and the Sonic sprites are almost guaranteed pre-renders or at the very least rotoscopes As far as the 3D Blast model goes, there were probably edits made to it before and after the posing and rendering to make them more visible in a lower color space (the mouth during the front facing spring animation which isn't there in the Sat/Win version) Hell, one of the tube rotation sprites in S3 looks dangerously similar to one of the standing sprites in S3D (which is a Gigantic stretch but still). I'm curious how far in development the SVP project got before getting scrapped. I'd love to see a super jank 3d model or pre-render.
I think they just converted a render straight into the game and it wasn't done by hand, not fully at least. considering the recent Sonic 3 Prototype. which just looks like they made a rough render. limited the color pallette, and then just threw it into the game. hence why it looks like crap. in case of the final render i just think they did the same. but redrew\edited some parts of the image to make it look better.
If so, that would imply they have multiple Sonic renders, or iterated the same one over time, and the S3 title screen is not the same as the S3D boxart, no? There are too many differences for it to line up.
Yeah. the weird European box art is obviously not the same thing. i still can't believe how bad it actually looks considering that before modelling somebody sculpted that thing in real life. i guess the sculptor just had 0 knownledge of how sonic is actually supposed to look like? or maybe they werent given a good reference. (or maybe that's just artists's weird art direction of something) this is probably one of the reasons SEGA just gave people their own models instead of people making their own stuff. because who knows how it might look. this didn't only happen with CGI models too. In case of Sonic R SEGA also gave them the character models. which initially looked pretty good (Jon Burton also made a video on those.) but developers at traveller's tales had to cut a lot of corners to put them in the game with acceptable perfomance so the final models don't look nearly as good.
Too bad he couldn't give away said SEGA models used for the Sonic R ones. But his workaround to that (literally giving away a molding guide to HD-fy said LQ models into the HQ ones) was simply genius, in my opinion.
It's the other way. StC updated their Sonic design (with quills going upward) after S3D launched. Second to last picture here :
that brings back happy memories..... But even back in the day I thought that 3d render of his head was god-awful, and my opinion hasnt changed.
Man, I'm trying to find the info on how EU Sonic 3D's box was made and who made it, but I can't seem to find it. Iicr, it was done by a physical clay(?) model, then CG-ed later on. I dunno, someone mentioned it here and linked it to a twitter post a long while back, and I can't seem to find the info now. haha If someone knows, let me know, it's bugging me.
YES! Rika Chou, you are a saint. Thank you! So yeah, that was done by "Me Company" https://mobile.twitter.com/y2k_aesthetic/status/1185707174384685056 Just thought this'd be interesting to mention. Interesting process as well. I find that it's cool that they develop a model first then digitize it to CG. Reminds me on how I draw my art (Traditionally hand-drawn on paper, scanned, then inked on PC)
