Portfolio Piece - Bioshock project

The start

I have recently been playing Bioshock, I never actually played the game before however I've played Bioshock infinite. So I decided to go back to the first game and play them through again from the start. I got to this point in the game and thought it was pretty cool, its around the third level in the game where you have to create a device that brings living plants back from the dead. I haven't spent much time with organic props (Plants + Trees) also would be good practice to create this kind of environment. It was also at this point I realized how amazing the environment work really is in Bioshock. Using Several images I found on google I managed to form a series of reference images from which I map out the environment with. It is very tricky to figure out environment from just images so I also found a youtube video to help aid with scale and position of all the objects.

Scale - I had to create a scale guide so I used a stylized zombie I made a few months back. 

Blocking out parts

After blocking out where everything goes I decided to start to concentrate on several areas. The first area I chose was the main focus of the room which is up on the higher platform where the player interacts with the machine.

The machine has a lot of things sticking out so this took a while to put together some of the parts are pretty basic as the extra details can be added with Normal maps. However there are parts which are fairly high poly as I what it to have plenty of details. The platform is pretty much complete it just needs extra details added to it then on to the rest of the room.

Update 17/01/2015

Adding details

So during the holidays I've been fairly busy finishing off other projects and spending time with family I haven't had much time to do any of this. I have however spent a few hours here and there adding in some details through using Z-Brush, I then have been using X-normal to render out the Normal and AO maps. Most of my time I have spent tweaking the maps so that they do show anything that shouldn't be there.

For the machine I added in some quick textures to make it more part of the scene and so that it doesn't look completely bare. I've basically isolating an area of the room that I can then compare the rest of the room to when it comes to quality. The next step is to add textures and finish blocking out the rest of the room.