I don't even use this thing anymore.

OH SHIT I CAN FINALLY POST THIS!

So, I knew about @akanemnon’s Gaster slightly (a while) before everyone else, but before I knew everything, I knew SOME THINGS.

Because of that, at one point I drew this! This is an animatic I did of Gaster using some rather familiar audio from before I knew his whole design, which means it won’t spoil anything coming up in the comic going forward!

DISCLAIMER: The Following Post is in response to a recent RTX Remix release of Sonic Adventure DX, where upon a quick glance, it was made very obvious that Sonic was run through the subdivision filter haphazardly. However, despite what I'm about to talk about, I do not condone harassment of any sort at the people(s) behind this mod over what I'm about to do in this thread. I'm a professional, I do this for money and shit, I'm gonna do better (I'd hope) than the average joe at this. When it comes to the idea of "remastering" a game, there are a lot of ways it can be done. I'm not gonna go into them here, but for the sake of what I'm about to talk about, let's get one thing clear. What I'm about to do in this thread is not normal. If you were to ask me how to "remaster" a model for a professional project, the answer would not be "well here's how you can modify the model to be better", it would be "make a new model".

(Pictured: A Mario) If you hand me a Nintendo 64 model and tell me to "make Mario better", I'm going to go make a new Mario, you've told me to make a skyscraper out of a trailer home. It's not IMPOSSIBLE, but why the fuck are you doing this to me?

(Pictured: Is it bad I can't tell which one is supposed to be the remaster...?) There's a few reasons I can think of off the top of my head that MAYBE it could be justifiable, ranging from budget to timeframe, but most of the time at this point remastering something that actually needs to be remastered (looking at you Neil Druckmann) means you're better off making something new that's built with the many innovations we've made in mind than trying to turn Leon Kennedy RE2 into Leon Kennedy RE2: Remake. We all clear on that? Good. So let's ignore that for a minute because we're gonna talk professionally about non-professional stuff. I see mods ALL THE TIME around the internet that claim to want to "remaster" the original models. Melee Falco REMASTERED, Secret Rings Sonic REMASTERED, and while some of these end up being FANTASTIC, a lot of them end up being... messes.

(Pictured: Not a mess. Ultimate Melee Fox by NanoBuds. A Remaster of a Remastered model by StarWaffle.) Model making is difficult, people get paid to do this for a reason, and many of the things people "don't like" about models are things that are there to make them actually work. This is actually less and less of an issue as time goes on with all the crazy shit we can do now, but especially back at the beginning of 3D games, a lot of "design philosophy" was "I need this to work and I have 5 polygons for this area here's what I can do to approximate hands." Nowadays, everyone has the opposite problem, it's "I have as many vertices as I want, arm must not be bending right since I don't have enough vertices, JESUS TAKE THE WHEEL!"

(Pictured: A model from a real game that actually came out and made more money than I possibly will ever make in my entire life.) Just because you CAN DO THAT NOW however doesn't mean you SHOULD, especially if you're putting the model back into the old framework. You could TRY to make, say, Frontiers Sonic work in Sonic Adventure DX.

(Pictured: You know, despite everything, this is a good porting job and I'm impressed it even works THIS well to be honest. Mod by "SoloSlacker".) ...But it doesn't mean you SHOULD or that he's suddenly going to have working fingers. He's trying his best, despite his arm, but you know, he wasn't built for this. But we're talking about a model that WAS built for this, right? Same problem, actually, if you handle it wrong. You go in, you hit subdivide, you go "That'll do", you put it back into the game, aaaaand why does Sonic blink with only HALF of the pretty new dots you put into his eyelids? Why are his pointy quills not pointy anymore? Is this even Sonic?

(Pictured: "Great Gameplay Is Timeless" - Some Narrator in the NVIDIA Commerical While THIS is on screen.) Now, I could tell you what was wrong with this model, I could sit here and point out to you that the shoe's texture is misaligned, that the ears are merged into the skull and eat into the circle shape that should make up it's composition... Or I could draw over it.

(Pictured: What the actual fuuuck happened?) There's a lot wrong with this model. The muzzle curve is FLAT, the ears are ALMONDS, they sanded off his EDGES, the quills seem to have some sort of reverse taper going on or something? It's BAD. And not in some "Oh, you're just being anal-retentive about the design philosophy" kind of way. The drawing on the right is how it's supposed to look, and you want to know how I know that?

Now, the POSE ISN'T A PERFECT RECREATION, in order to pose this thing you have to navigate a sea of razor thin crosses rather than the traditional armature system because, I don't know, someone at the Models Resource is having a laugh I guess, but everything I am about to say, undeniably, is a part of the original model, and I don't want to hear it about "well they updated the philosophy", these are likely MISTAKES and I'll prove it to you here in a minute.

(Pictured: The creatuuure.)

- The ears have lost their curve at the bottom, these spatial indicators allow you to quickly tell at a glance what direction Sonic is facing even with flat colors. This has been intentional for years, and while Sonic no longer does this, he does so HERE. - The Muzzle Curve is flatter, making him a new surprise relative of Olympic Games Sonic! - His mouth seems to be wider at the cheeks, this is likely because the original used a texture in that area instead of modelling it so that way it could look nicer (less polygons, remember?) - His head seems to have merged further with his quills, making an amorphous blob. Somebody help that poor thing. And that's only the head we're talking about, by the way. I'm not going to bother breaking down the whole body. It's fucked too, but it's less fucked, though also it's harder to fuck up. They still did, though, the chest shape is a great example.

(Pictured: RTX on! Wow! How do I turn it off?) Anyways, I've done a lot of shit-talking, but I promised you proof I wasn't talking out of my ass. So I present to you... proof. This took me about...15 minutes. I did the entire head in about 6, paused to check my phone, then did the rest of the upper body before deciding "I don't want to try to re-merge the foot right now" and came back to writing this.

For all you "fucking nerds" out there, all I really did was apply a bit of edge creasing to the head overall, then haphazardly grab points on the spine to make it sharp again, recreating what I assume to be the exact same thing that happened in the "official" model.

I tried to merge as little as possible as well, most of these objects are the same way they came in, and a lot of these objects have *no* edge creases on them, like the hands and the chest circle. Basically, what I am telling you with this is that the model inside of this Remix is not "an intentionally designed upgrade", and if it is I want to know what the design philosophy was behind "doing a bad job." But it's easy to throw fucking stones, I'm not about that, a lot of "critique threads" out there that don't nut up or shut up.

(Pictured: About 3 hours of work.) Here's my HD Sonic, he's a cruel little mutant, not of our world, and certainly should not be trusted with knives but hey, you know, he's family. My design philosophy here was pretty simple: I wanted to talk the old model, and make it smoother. Sounds remarkably fucking simple, right? Well, it is.

The entire time I was working I would constantly turn the subdivision on and off, go look at the old model, look at the old reference sheet, and then, from there, I'd make very minor modifications. For instance, I really wanted to bring out the detail in the brow, so I went in and added some extra loops there to allow me to bezel that brow a bit more.

(Pictured: Before and After). The next thing I did was go in and start merging things together. The model itself is seperated into pieces usually, which is fine, but you don't HAVE to do that anymore, since I was merging those pieces, I realized I could run into a problem if I just ADDED A MATERIAL onto what used to be seperated cheek with a texture, so I carved out where originally there were pixels to get the CORRECT curve. I then used the extra real-estate to have it kinda stick out! It's a small detail, but on the final I think it'll look really nice. Speaking of "final", something I was thinking about doing I didn't end up committing too was adding back Sonic's noise texture.

I actually went so far as to start cleaning up the topology to use more quads, but then I realized that the MOD wasn't doing it, so why the hell should I?

I did, however, give Sonic FINGERS. They're mainly for show, but if we're going to try to make the model higher definition, why are we keeping the mittens again? This is actually the original hand resized and merged to each other, and while the topology isn't perfect, it should bend close enough to the original that if you were to rig it and injected it back into the game it should work pretty alright.

The feet were super interesting, because they're actually not centered! The legs enter into the shoe as if the hole was closer to the middle of Sonic's center of gravity. I'm assuming that it's probably an intentional design decision, and if I were to mess with it too much, Sonic's feet would clip into each other far more often.

That didn't stop me from modelling the details into the shoe, however. It's not perfect, if I wanted to be a perfectionist I'd get some texture work going, but we already talked about that. The buckle is actually the original texture still, by the way, I thought it was cute that it still kinda worked when I cut out the shape, so I left it.

The spines definitely had the most work done out of everything here. I cleaned up the entry points into the skull, but I still left a bit of that smooth curve because I'm sure if someone were to use this for animation, it'd be appreciated. These quills MOVE, so having as much space for them to not clip and intersect as possible is vital.