Uploaded October 2014 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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For a more detailed explanation of what's going on in the video, read this Sonic Retro post: forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=25598&view=findpost&p=803605

The mods used in the video are:
- A modified version of the Unleashed Project, with restored textures and materials to their original versions (for the sake of comparing accuracy). Any re-textures will likely need to be re-done again in a much more accurate way to the originals.
- Zoney's Unleashed Model Mod along with several general object replacement mods (springs, etc.), using their original materials as well.
- Unleashed Shaders mod which includes all the converted Xbox 360 shaders so far. This has nothing to do with the "Unleashed FxPipeline Shaders" mod (commonly misunderstood as "Unleashed Shaders" mod), which all it does is modify the regular Generations shaders to be compatible with FxPipeline and does minimal changes to the game's overall shading style.
- Regular FxPipeline .exe generated by SonicGMI, hex-editted to increase the Shadowmap resolution.

Every single thing rendered by the game except for post-processing effects has been ported from the Xbox 360 version of Sonic Unleashed. This was done by developing a converter that takes Xbox 360 GPU Microcode Vertex/Pixel shaders and outputs a PC compatible one. There's quite a lot of issues that need to be worked out first with the converter and it's very inefficient performance wise, but the results so far are pretty cool to look at. It's pretty similar in theory to something like Xbox 360 GPU Emulation, but in a very specific way catered to everything that is compatible between both Unleashed and Generations. There's a lot of specific hacks that are done by the converter for stuff like fog/depth buffers/shadowmaps to work properly.

By going directly to the source of how stuff is rendered and porting it exactly from the game the stages are designed for, we put an end to most material inaccuracies. Porting post-processing effects on the other hand is a bit impossible due to needing to change how the rendering pipeline works in the first place. There may be a few general differences in color tone, but keep in mind the PS3 version of Unleashed is the one that has accurate color, while 360 has a bad Gamma curve. Capturing devices, even Nvidia's own Shadowplay which was used for this video, can also introduce color alterations.

Note: This is NOT a post-processing effect in the vein of SweetFX or an injector. It completely changes the way the game's materials are rendered pixel by pixel, and even adds support for new types of materials. It's just a regular Sonic Generations mod like any other.

I will probably upload a few more previews of other stages that had a pretty nice transformation overall, but keep in mind this is nowhere near done yet and is pretty much the first tests of the conversion.

Here's a nice Screenshot album of what I have so far: minus.com/miANoRITrcx95