A custom high quality model of Sonic for Sonic Adventure 2!

On October 21st, after 7 years since modding SA2 PC started in 2012, together we finally cracked the code for modding custom character models into Sonic Adventure 2! Having roughly finished the weighted model exporter for blender, i decided to prepare my custom Sonic model, which i usually use for renders, to be modded into SA2 for testing purposes, and as the model successfully loaded into the game i released it as soon as possible, with smaller updates such as the HD light dash upgrades following shortly after.

About the model: "Custom" is not precisely fitting, as the hands and shoes are heavy-edits of the forces models and the muzzle an edited version of the unleashed muzzle. The Body itself though is fully custom and made by me. The hands went through slight retopologizing and reshaping around the fingers to make them look less like balloons, and the soap shoes have details modelled into the mesh, which were originally done through normal maps.The light dash models are fully custom, utilizing defined vertex normals to ensure cleaner environment mapping.

As for textures, the soap shoes use the diffuse texture from sonic forces, while the body textures are hand drawn (except for the gloves, which used a wool texture as the base). I've exchanged the eye environment map with a higher quality one that i assembled from multiple matcaps and the eye texture itself was made by my friend @TBSF_YT.I exchanged the metal environment map of the light dash upgrades with a higher quality one, and used a simple green to white gradient as an environment texture for the glow. The solid part of the upgrade is drawn by hand, which admittedly looks a little bland, as i am no professional texture artist.

About the mod itself; Right now it only replaces the basic Character model and the light dash upgrades and all textures that those models use. The mod also removes the LoD models used for Sonic, which would usually swap out with the main model if the character is 150 units far away from the camera. More features, such as HD models for the other upgrades or other related models (such as the jump ball) might be added in the future.The only type of problem comes with a few cutscenes: Most cutscenes have their own model with their own textures for sonic, but some just replace the head and hands and leave the ingame models and textures, which will ultimatively lead to some glitched looking cutscenes (like the cutscene right before sonic fights 'f-6t big foot').

This mod presents only the first of many model mods for SA2 to come, as we now finally have the tools needed to easily create custom models!