Surface Digital

Surface Digital is a digital creative agency "specialising in games based media."^[1] Surface Digital has worked on numerous video games, including Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising (2009), Operation Flashpoint: Red River (2011) and Gears of War: Judgement (2013).^[2]

Surface Digital worked on art direction, template models and promotional renders for Aliens vs. Predator (2010).^[3]

Work[]

Aliens vs. Predator[]

AVP-Images 07 — Some of Surface Digital's work on the game.^[3]

See also: Aliens vs. Predator (2010 video game)

Rebellion were already in the production phase of Aliens vs. Predator, with an E3 demo only a few weeks away, when SEGA's Gary Moore wanted Surface Digital to get involved and help improve the art on the game. Their brief was to look over the demo and make small yet significant tweaks to the existing artwork. This is always a difficult ask as time was at a premium and asking an external team to make quality improvements when the demo still needed to be completed is tough.^[3]

Looking over the current art direction for the project, Surface Digital identified a few areas they would be able to help out with. Within the environment, there was set dressing and details that needed to be added to increase the visual fidelity.^[3]

The character models had been built to a good standard, but there seemed to be a disparity between the first person hand models and the third person characters. Surface Digital found that the first person hand models needed more work and attention to really enhance the detail. To do this, Digital went back to the original Predator and Aliens reference. New hand models and new uv mapping needed to be created to create the correct proportion of the hands. With the UV mapping, Digital really "went extra", utilizing "almost every pixel to get the most out of the texture detail." With these models finished and handed back to Rebellion, Digital turned our attention to helping out rendering the games in game characters for promotional materials.^[3]