Model Editting - Body - Joe the Echidnafox

Welcome to the Model Editing Tutorial. This tutorial will show you how to manipulate an existing sprite, add features from other sprites, and modify a sprite to give it more of a unique style.
With the Head done the next most important thing is to give him a body. Before you start editing your body you need to make sure it will fit with your head. You need to think about sizes when mixing sprites from different games, because in most cases they won't mix.

Ok for this exercise we are going to be using the techniques we used on the head on Knuckles' body. I've used the Sonic Battle sprite for the reason we just discussed. Import your body in and clean up any background rubbish you need so you only have the character on the same coloured background as your head.

Now get rid of everything you don't need, the head, the feet, the hands, just leaving the bulk of the body. But wait there is a problem, look at the red area to the blue area. Because of his dreadlocks, opart of his back has been hidden. We need to fix this before continuing.

You need to use other body parts (or as a last resort, your imagination) to figure out where anything that is missing goes. In this case, there isn't much clue as to where his back is. Fill in the lineart where you think that the body should go, and delete what is not needed afterwards. Zoom out and take a look at the shape. If your happy, colour it in with Sonic's shades of blue and make it fit with the SB style shading. If your not happy, start over. Here you can see the final areas that were changed in red.

With the main bulk of the body done, you can start to edit and add parts to it as you like. You can guess that here I have added a Sonic Spike and Tails Tail. Do this before you add the head on.

When putting the head on, make sure you put it on in the correct place (where Knuckles' head was before) to stop the edit looking wierd. Make sure you move the Head on top of the body (by selecting the head first and dragging it onto the body).

Mixing the bodies of characters is very difficult to get perfect, and will require a lot of practice. It may be a better idea once you have gotten the hang of these techniques is to start making bodies from scratch as soon as possible as this can give much better results.