The Making of Murder Sonic

Murder Sonic - The Death Machine of Stardust Speedway
(in Unreal Engine 5.0 Early Access seen in the scene made last week "Stardust Savior")
Stardust Savior: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/YKOnrX

I re-imaged what a primary rival character from the cutesy world of Sonic the Hedgehog, Metal Sonic would be like if it were truly designed and built for the purpose that Robotnik intended - to end all its targets. To end Sonic. Visit the art station page to know more details on what references inspired the shapes and forms that went into creating this monstrosity. It's not for everyone, but in a retro game revamp of an old classic like Sonic CD it would be nice to see some gruesomely realistic details when moving into next gen graphics.

Murder Sonic was made based on scaling from the first character of the Stardust Savior project (Sonic). After moodboarding and breaking apart the Sonic model into the proportions I envisioned for Murder I could start modeling his block out forms then move on to polished pieces. I was able to get him from ideation, to hackey photobashed together in pureref concept to modeling, textured and finished in under 8 days. Technically because his head was based off a mushed around mangled up version of Sonic's original mesh there was some "Zbrush" used however most of the work was done purely modeling in Maya. There is no high poly sculpt for this character since all went straight to hard edge workflows from the based modeling. Check out the reference breakdown page to know what all elements influenced which pieces of his design. If you are a concept artist and your work is found in my reference call outs without your name clearly visible please contact me so I an credit you in this work details blurb appropriately.

By the way due to time constraint and lack of experience with any rapid rigging and animation techniques I was not able to rig this model. The animations you see in the youtube of Murder Sonic are simply Mixamo auto riggings on a default idle. The poses of the main Stardust Savior scene and this making of Murder Sonic scene were all done by hand arranging the meshes and parent groups in Maya for now. On the next challenge for the next character I will try to dig deeper into rigging.