Why don't the Chao in Sonic Adventure look the same?

[chaoadventures]

Okay, so in Sonic Adventure an average Chao looks like this.


During cutscenes they look like this.


Now, the cutscene Chao are some un-obtainable dark blue (but not quite) two tone.

Any in-universe theories on this?

But, I would also like to know why the developers made them look different. I would guess they could just substitute the models, for consistency or at least have the same colors.

[ShadriaFan]

these are older chao. Aka the ancestors of the chao we know now. They don't look the same as Chao has evolved since then.

[CitrusCat]

Yeah, this always confused me, too. Those cutscene Chao models look quite hideous compared to the normal models used in the Gardens. I honestly have no explanation for why this is the case.

Also, the Chao in the cutscenes don't seem to be a new/unobtainable color, but rather the normal two-tone default Chao. It just looks different due to the poor quality of the models/shading. Or, perhaps the texture is separate from the Garden Chao's texture, meaning that the body's coloring could just be slightly off. For example, it is worth noting that the eye texture for this model is completely different. I mean, just look! The Garden Chao have much darker eyes, appearing to be almost black. But, the cutscene Chao have bright blue eyes.

But yeah, it just doesn't make sense as to why they had to make separate models for this. They just look really bad in comparison, and it just feels strange and out of place. Especially since we're all so used to the normal Chao in our gardens.

[Snowy]

these are older chao. Aka the ancestors of the chao we know now. They don't look the same as Chao has evolved since then.

^ This, so much this.

Those chao are from the time Tikal was alive, so it kinda makes sense if chao look slighty different from what they do now. Time passes and things change. Who's to say they didn't evolve to look more uh, cute, chubby, and loveable? I mean, they need happiness to evolve right? So maybe they evolved into the chao we have now so that people would love them more so they could be happy and turn into neutral/run/run's or hero/run/run's, etc. Ya know?

If that was the reason behind this, they're geniuses.

[KeatonLabs]

Probably truly just to make it easier on the systems, it was a dreamcast game and the models werent the cleanest things ever but i think it was to save on resources were it wasnt too necessary

[FedoraBrella Chao]

In Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast, as shown here, newborn chao have green highlights instead of yellow. So the cutscene chao are even more different from the chao garden chao in the Dreamcast version.

[EvilPinkamina]

Because SEGA is terrible with consistency, and the dreamcast was terrible.

[Jeffery Mewtamer]

If I'm not mistaken, the cutscenes in SA1 are for the most part rendered on the fly in-engine. Since Chao are little more than window dressing in most of the cutscenes where they appear, it's not that unreasonable to think the Chao got lower quality cutscene assets to help with performance issues and Sega never bothered to replace these with assets more in-line with the Garden assets when the game got ported to more powerful hardware(Even the Gamecube version of SADX, while containing new content(mainly mission mode and upgrade graphics) is missing most, if not all, of the Dreamcast DLC and is often criticized for having many bugs return from the Dreamcast version, introducing new bugs, and being half-assed in some of it's graphical updates, and each subsequent port tends to be less liked)

Though, since you mention the cutscene Chao looking darker than garden Chao, I have to ask:
1. Are you comparing accross all cutscenes featuring Chao or just the Siege on the Altar? If you are only looking at the Siege, the darker coloration could be explained by the overall darker lighting during that scene(It's a night scene, the primary source of light in-scene are fires burning nearer to the red end of the spectrum).
2. In particular, how do Garden Chao compare with cutscene Chao from Perfect Chaos's post-battle cutscene? If I am not mistaken, this is the only present-day cutscene featuring Chao.
3. The Window to do so is limited, but the Mystic Ruins Garden can be entered at night. How do Chao in the night time garden compare to Chao during the Siege?

Technical issues and lighting aside, in addition to most of the Chao seen in cutscenes being from roughly 3,000 years ago(and humans of today bare little resemblance to humans of 3,000 years ago despite being genetically identical at the species level, so evolution in its proper biological sense isn't necessary), Do consider that the Chao seen during past cutscenes are wild chao while garden chao are persumably domesticated chao. Afterall, domesticated dogs, cats, pigs, and chickens bare little resemblance to the Gray Wolf, African Wildcat, Wild Boar, and Junglefowl from which they were domesticated.

Though, I wonder how feasible it would be to patch the 2004 version of SADXPC to make cutscene Chao look like their Garden counterparts. Hackers usually don't care much for Chao, but since fixing bugs and prettying up aged graphics are usually things that interest hackers, it might get done if brought to the right person's attention.

[chaoadventures]

Because SEGA is terrible with consistency, and the Dreamcast was terrible.

Eh. Sonic Adventure was a launch title. Adventure 2's graphics and quality went up considerably and look pretty good in comparison to the GameCube. It was a launch title, on a system that took 2
years to get to its full potential though, which would explain why the Chao's model themselves look different then usual during the cutscenes.

Though, since you mention the cutscene Chao looking darker than garden Chao, I have to ask:
1. Are you comparing accross all cutscenes featuring Chao or just the Siege on the Altar? If you are only looking at the Siege, the darker coloration could be explained by the overall darker lighting during that scene(It's a night scene, the primary source of light in-scene are fires burning nearer to the red end of the spectrum).
2. In particular, how do Garden Chao compare with cutscene Chao from Perfect Chaos's post-battle cutscene? If I am not mistaken, this is the only present-day cutscene featuring Chao.
3. The Window to do so is limited, but the Mystic Ruins Garden can be entered at night. How do Chao in the night time garden compare to Chao during the Siege?

1. I'm looking at all of the cutscenes for reference.

2. At the end of the game, when Tikal shows Chaos, the Chao he's been protecting they're the same color as the rest of the cutscenes. This might contradict the ancestor thing, but since
Tikal is a spirit, that can take the form of what she looked like before, the ancestor Chao's spirits might have also done the same. Wild Chao also might be the answer.

3. From what I barely remember, the Chao look slightly darker, but not the same as the cutscene Chao.

[naruto_chao]

They probably had to lower the amount of polygons used in the models to stop the cut scenes from lagging terribly. A few of them had a lot going on and would have lagged.

At least I think so.