— Would you kindly? —

— Introduction and Motivation —

First of all, thank you for reading my entry!! I really hope you like it. 

For this project I wanted to create 3D fanart of one of my favorite videogames, Bioshock. It's a project I've been wanting to do for a lot of years but never felt confident enough to start working on it... so this contest gave me the opportunity to stop worrying about not being enough and start working on my abilities to create the art I've always admired and wanted to create myself.

Rapture tunnel [Environment]

The first part of my entry consists on a video sequence that features one of Rapture's (the city where Bioshock takes place!) iconic underwater tunnels. I took inspiration from both the videogame and its concept art since I wanted to replicate it's vibe but make it a little more photorealistic, so for the lighting and shading part I focused more on the concept art than on the game itself.

Everything was modeled and animated with Autodesk Maya, and texturized with substance painter and photoshop. The fluids and particles were simulated with Maya aswell! For the camera animation I took inspiration on how it looks in the game and then recorded myself walking using the camera as if It were my eyes to replicate the movements I wanted to recreate in the sequence. 

For the storytelling part I chose Andrew Ryan's final monologue because it's one of my favorite videogame moments and It matched the vibe I was going for and Bioshock's embedded narrative. 

Rendering the whole sequence was a challenge, so I optimized render times as much as I could. Every render pass except the fluids was rendered with Arnold GPU and I separated them by lights both for compositing and for saving up render time since not all the lights needed the same amount of sampling.

Light compositing and color correction were done using Blackmagic Fusion. For the video composition, audio and final color adjustments, I used DaVinci Resolve.

Gatherer's garden and diary! [Props]

The first time I played Bioshock I fell in love with its aesthetic and one of my favorite designs was the Gatherer's garden one, so I wanted to recreate it in 3D and redesign some parts to add my own personal touch.

I changed its original color palette to make the main body more purple instead of red and added some vines on its sides to recreate its in-game location since it's always surrounded by plants. The neon light that's on its top it's also more exaggerated and I changed its color to be white-ish instead of pink. The diary looks pretty much the same as it does in the game, I wanted to render it in the same scene as the garden because its red light matches the plasmid's (the red bottles) liquid!

I also wanted to animate a little bit both of the props!! The Gatherer's garden has plasmid bottles that have animated liquid, this was achieved using an animated texture. The diary has an animated red emissive texture and its wheels rotate to make it look like it's working. The fog that's near the floor was created with a maya 3D fluid and animated perlin noise as an opacity texture. 

♡ Thank you for checking out my entry! ♡