Beach Day | MFA Lookdev Thesis
Beach Day is my MFA Lookdev thesis project. I began production on this project in Spring 2023, and completed it in the Spring 2025 semester.
Programs: Unreal Engine, Maya, Substance Painter, Arnold Renderer, Nuke, Houdini, Marvelous Designer.
I used Unreal Engine to produce renders of my environment scenes using a workflow designed by my advisor and mentor, Derek Flood. This workflow allows the artist to build, edit, and render incredibly large scenes extremely quickly. By rendering environment/lighting maps from the Unreal scene, I can easily match the lighting on my hero characters and assets, which were rendered in Arnold using the “standard” Maya workflow.
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The rest of this page is a work in progress! You may see me updating details on this page during the first two weeks of April 2025. 🔧✨
Table of Contents
Concept Art
I used a character rig that I already owned: the Dana Rig by Gabriel Salas. Using a rig let me pose the character in unique positions in each shot without having to worry about the rigging myself. I wanted to customize the character for my project, so I decided to give the character a bubble braid hairstyle as an xGen challenge for myself.
In addition, I hoped to customize the character’s clothes beyond the simple t-shirt and pants on the original rig. I designed a lacy shirt as a surfacing challenge. The shorts I added with practicality in mind: since I would pose the character in different positions in each shot, I wanted something skin-tight enough to easily pose or clothsim in to place.
Character Lookdev
Set Dressing & Texturing
Unreal Shot Setup
A WIP of shot building progress in Unreal.