Stardust Speed Demon: The Training of Metal Sonic

Happy New Year! The following music video style short film is the culmination of about 7 months of sleepless asset creation; Overloading the brain on totally unknown software, and a truckload of trial and error. This is a Sonic Movie 3 style re-imagining of how Robotnik (Jim Carrey) trained Metal Sonic to be one of Sonic's most formidable enemies. This final render, which is not even a render technically as I simply screen captured the whole thing due to UE5's video renderer glitches etc, is far from perfect but in the interest of time I have to keep these lessons I have learned here and move on. Sorry for the noisy image quality and I still run HD monitors so I will not ship anything in 4K any time soon. I am first and foremost a professional 3D sculpt, modeling, and texture (+shader) artist and by no means am I anything close to an animator or cinematographer. There are broken things everywhere, the pacing is off places and yes I was too worn out to deal with the hyper white over exposed VFX. Prior to starting this project I had never seriously taken an effort to try and actually rig let alone animate a character. Lots of painful time losing mistakes were made and tons of valuable lessons were learned. With the next project I will make an effort to improve upon the obvious hang ups you may discover here in this work. Thanks for stopping by, please support the channel by like and subscribing for more if you like what you see!

Technical details:
As a solo artist, in the interest of time I used every resource possible to quickly create the assets I could not manage to make the time to do entirely from scratch. 7 months of modeling and kit bashing a few premade/bought assets to create the world and characters. My career path is character focused so much of the bespoke hand-made work centered around the characters and vehicles while kit bashing bought assets primarily to quickly make the parts of the environment which I had not already made on my own since the previously popular Stardust Savior video upload.

Assets created from scratch:
• Stardust Speedway Present Track and Exterior (A re-skin )
• Robotnik’s Flight Suit and fat version Jim Carrey head sculpt (scan head data was used)
• Prototype Metal Sonic (updated from last project)
• Hyper Metal Sonic (the blue variant)
• Robotnik’s Egg Pod

Assets used from external sources:
Robotnik’s Speed Gun – customized and reskinned version of SchrisArt’s Temperature checker on SketchFab:
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/temperature-scanner-7b9be5e13ba94f39be36112f2d254fb3

Egg Pod Quartz Fuel model – recreated from a quarts rock scan asset off SketchFab:
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/sample-191-a26d06cd72c441e0a1914fe26a5daf13

Robotnik’s Soldering Iron – Made using Oleg Ushenok – Hard Surface Mechanical Set from Art Station:
https://olegushenok.artstation.com/projects/D5BgwA

Robotanica Republic Labs – Lab interior created using the follow assets edited -
Stone Mason’s (Stefan Morrell's) Daz Environment:
https://www.daz3d.com/eclipse-the-white-room
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/VgqmOZ

Denys Rutkovskyi’s Unreal Marketplace Environment:
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/spaceship-interior-environment-set

All Characters were rigged and skinned using Reallusion Character Creator 3. Animations made with iClone 8 (or direct edits in Unreal).

Facial beard and groom assets were hand edited from CC4 hair pack stuff tied to their facial rig.

Of the animations used in the video half of them or less were sourced or started from iClone store assets, AccuRig library, or entirely retargeted Mixamo inside unreal. Everything else from motions and poses that did not exist or were not perfect to use as is were either made manually in iClone or manually FK edited directly in Unreal's animation viewer itself – no control rigs, did not know how to make one.

Blueprint nodes were used to gather 3D space Look At vector data captured and sent down on simulation to UV scalar parameters to animate Metal Sonics 2D eyes and blink cycle.

Music:
Taking the original North American version Stardust Speedway Present level sound track from Sonic CD (NA OST), I used LMMS software to build up a new beat and toss in some other instruments. The goal was to take a classic Michael Jackson song and retrofit it into an official Sonic game music track to play up the real lore surrounding Jackson’s music influencing much of the music from the 90s era Sonic franchise games. Taking inspiration from remixes in the style of Yuzo Koshiro (a.k.a. @Yuzoboy ) I tried my best to chop up, pitch change and stretch the MJ Classic “Speed Demon” (Epic Records) to fit into a catchy loop. If you listen close you will hear hints of another theme song included from a popular 90’s era Robot action film you may know very well. I recommend right clicking over the play button and setting it to loop.