A community-developed Sonic Mania mod, redrawing various frames and bodyparts of Sonic's spriteset for consistency and quality.
Public contributions are appreciated! Just please list what you drew or edited and the alias/URL by which you would like to be credited.
Development discussion is hosted at The Sonic & Co. Spriting Guild.
You may have seen several Sonic Mania mods attempting to replace the whole of Sonic's spriteset with assets from other Sonic games or original assets tailored to the author's individual style or personal fixings.
To contrast, this mod intends to break down Sonic Mania's artstyle and how it treats Sonic for the purposes of cleaning up mistakes, such as questionable anatomy, without inventing a new identity.
Isn't this redundant with "Character Edits Plus"?
While CE+ Sonic does edit out a lot of instances of poor spriting techniques from base Mania, a lot of its edits moreso have to do with changing Mania's visual identity to something more akin to recent portrayals of Classic Sonic in 3D, such as a more muted tone of blue, visible shoe buckles, and spines that flow directly off of the sides of Sonic's head.
To contrast, Mania Sonic Refined intends to take from Sonic 1/CD's depiction of Sonic as it is prioritized in Mania's borrowed animations and seemingly used as the basis for its original animations. Animations such as Sonic's turn-around may be completely redrawn if they are considered too far out of line with this depiction of Sonic whereas CE+ Sonic may have simply edited them for clarity and readability.
Hence, this is what makes this mod separate from CE+ Sonic: A difference in opinion on how to "fix" his sprites.
However, other features from CE+ Sonic, such as additional animations, mod compatibility, and configurable palettes, may be considered in the future.