Sonic X Shadow Generations thread, movie level out now

They more specifically said that they made the animations with UE5 and Maya, then had them translated into HE2, which I wonder if that is actually more effective than just running it solely on either engine.

 

The deformation effect is WAAAAY too much IMO. I haven’t had time to read through the article, but did they indicate whether or not that is the degree to which they’d implement it? Or is it just testing out some built-in tool.

A little more care into the animation would definitely be appreciated though! Squash and stretch is just really easy to overdo. Even Shadow 05 was a bit too much. Shadow Gens has been a step in the right direction in terms of effort, but I still think the overall animation and art direction can be a bit more stylized.

As an aside: It’s kind of annoying how obviously that one YouTube video on Sonic animation has transformed Sonic discourse into, “DAE squash and stretch?!?!” It’s like “momentum,” or “pinball physics,” before it. No one really discussed it and then everyone suddenly acts like they are the first person to propose some major breakthrough. /rant

 

Seems like its just typical testing for the limits of the tools, the other examples seem to show it more reserved (minus the sonic stretching in the death egg robots hand that ones kinda pushing it too but i fuck with it)

They also have a shadow model warping wildly in the article which is pretty funny

 

The mirror scene in UE5 looks so good (minor fur shader issue in the crevices of his spines aside), I wish I could see it without the comparison overlay. It's also not a terrible showcase for this in general since that scene was always just slightly awkward, and what little of the smile animation with it on we can see (seriously why aren't we seeing the scenes with/without individually?) seems to give it a little more character, but in general I'm not a huge fan since I like my Sonic characters to be physically coherent and grounded, but apparently they've already used this effect in Shadow Generations so it probably wasn't too bad there.

Unrelated, tell me again why Superstars was in Unity when they could have had nice shader effects like that for free?

 

They're experimenting with an innovative type of vertex shading so these test animations are purposefully made to push it to the extreme. I imagine they'll dial it back a bit for an official game.

The type of vertex animation they're working on was apparently quite hard to achieve in HE. To be fair, HE2 is almost 10 years old so I wouldn't be surprised if they update it or make HE3. Crossworlds being built entirely on UE5 makes me think they might just ditch HE altogether.

 

From a financial standpoint, it would make more sense for SEGA to keep using HE, which is proprietary, over Unreal, which requires a yearly license fee.

 

Well, you still have to pay employees to develop a proprietary engine, and train employees in how to use it. A new employee coming from college or another studio might know how to use UE5, but they're starting from scratch when it comes to HE2.

So, it is possible UE5 would be more cost-effective, even with the fee, between the saved development and training costs.

All that being said, I hope they stick with HE2. I like proprietary engines. They're neat.

 

licensing for UE5 is actually royalty-based, 5% of revenue above a million that they don't take if It's a sale on the Epic store. Even if they did have to pay for a license year by year, chances are that they would be anyways since Unreal is so popular and SEGA releases so many games that one is bound to be in Unreal.

 

Yeah, that’s what I imagined was going on but I was worried the text was going to say, “This is exactly how ST wants to animate future games,” lol. Like some sort of Monkey’s Paw version of all of us wishing they would improve the animation… I will read through the article today and see what it actually says. For some reason that page constantly crashes my phone browser so I’ll have to pull it up later on my laptop.

 

yeah I was having the same problem too, idk what's going on there lol

 

The page has a looooot of embedded YouTube links, like 30 of them.

 

because the superstar devs had already worked with and had experience with unity and trying to make them to use a completely different engine for slightly nicer graphics would've made the game an outright disaster?

 

Arzest previously used Unreal Engine for Balan Wonderworld, although it occurred to me development would have started before 5 was properly released.

 

Balan Wonderworld sounds like a great example of why not to use Unreal Engine.

 

People are doin' a lot of sweeping assumptions in here regarding game engines.

The "HE2" we see in Frontiers is not the "HE2" we see in Forces. The tech is always evolving. Slapping a new number at the end is and always will be arbitrary for marketing and/or to signify a major technical change.

Yeah, UE5 has been gaining a lot of ground in asset generation. There's workflow advantages to working in Unreal even if you're exporting to something else.

Yesn't..? In-house game engines aren't suddenly "free" because you aren't paying licensing cost. If anything, internal engines are something of a sunk cost fallacy when it comes to both technical maintenance and implementing new and shiny rendering features.

Licensing something like Unreal on a major support contract would net them dedicated engineering talent from Epic. The base featureset of Unreal continually gets updated, and their dedicated engineers can build custom features for them - not to mention integrating their existing tooling with UE. See: The FF7R team rolling their own materials system within the UE renderer, CDPR dropping REDEngine.

Much like RenderWare back in the day, Unreal's support contract lets studios - SEGA included -worry less about technical upkeep.

Nothing comes free with a given engine - that's not how this works at all

i know this is a bit but balan's issues very clearly stem from time management and scope creep issues in direction and production lol

 

On one hand, UE5 performs TERRIBLY. Awful ghosting and low framerates and stuttering galore. Even if optimization is dependent on the developers, it's very clear that UE5's default settings or whatever aren't helping things. Plus, it's contributing to a massive growth of developers abandoning all inhouse development to just be part of the Unreal hivemind.

But on the other hand, Hedgehog Engine 2 suuuuuuucks. All of the pizazz and speed from Hedgehog Engine 1 has been gone since Lost world, and the boost formula games feel like a shadow (hehe) of what they once were. Comparing Generations' phenomenal modern levels to Shadow Gens on a different engine is a night and day difference. If they brought back that Unleashed/Gens feel of boost formula gameplay in UE5, I would accept the engine switch. But they probably won't.

 

That has almost nothing to do with the engine and almost everything to do with how they chose to design the game.

 

And even then, most of it is just the camera distance and FOV.

 

it would be interesting to see a mod for Unleashed/Generations that zooms out the camera distance and FOV like Frontiers/Shadow Gens. The former games originally focused on the spectacle of speed and the latter focus more on readability.