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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Table of Contents
Concept Art
To make the character, I decided to use a character rig that I already owned: the Dana Rig by Gabriel Salas. Using a rigged character would let me pose the character in unique positions in each shot, without me having to do any rigging myself. With the basic workflow decided, I went ahead and took a viewport render of Dana into a painting program (CSP) to paint a customized character design.
I used the customization/design process to give myself more lookdev challenges while keeping in mind the possible difficulties of moving away from the rig’s existing t-shirt and pants design. I designed a lacy shirt as a surfacing challenge, with wide ruffled sleeves that I believed could sim well. The shorts, too, would be relatively simple to clothsim, while also being a reasonable clothing choice for someone at the beach (compared to long pants. I decided to give Dana a bubble braid hairstyle as an xGen challenge, but also so that I could have full control when posing each hair bubble in each shot.
For Dana’s cat, I used a rig provided by the Academy of Art called the Kit Rig. Kit, being a cat, was much more straightforward to sketch out a concept for. I planned on making a calico cat with green eyes, and I roughly sketched out the direction of the fur to help visualize the groom splines I would be making in the future.
Character Lookdev
With concept art ready to go, I began the process of creating my characters in 3D.
First, I modeled the clothing for Dana. I used Marvelous Designer, a program I had never used before, to create the clothes models. Thankfully, the program is intuitive to use and I have always been quite fascinated by sewing and clothes-making, so I was able to effectively use my casual understanding of clothing patterns to create a shirt and pants for Dana.
Marvelous Designer has great, fast clothes sim capabilities, but since I would be posing Dana in Maya, I was worried that my clothing models would not translate well into Maya sims. So, after I exported the models into Maya, did a few sim tests, and adjusted the clothing accordingly. I needed to adjust the scale of the models, weld quite a few vertices together, and touch up the UV maps. Then, I was done with the clothing models and ready to texture Dana.
Texturing Dana was a very straightforward task. For her clothes, used a tiling bump map to control the weave of the fabrics, and painted in some color variation to make the materials look a bit more natural. I wanted to make Dana’s shirt lacy like many summer blouses can be. To create the lace, I used a pattern texture control the opacity of the shirt. Only doing this makes the shirt look like it has holes cut out of it, instead of actual lace. The key was to add a bit of bump to the lace and the reinforcing fabric surrounding the lace.
Then on to the hair groom. I created
Alternate versions?
Since Dana and Kit are spending a full day at the beach, they would both become covered in sand as the day wears on. So, I created an alternate lookdev version of both characters where Dana is covered in sand, and Kit’s fur is wet.
Creating an alternate version of Dana was simple. In Maya, I created a new sand material using textures from Quixel Megascan assets I was using elsewhere in the project. Then, I replaced every existing shader on Dana with new aiLayerShaders that combined the original shader, and my new sand shader. Then it was back into Substance/Photoshop to create some quick masks for where the sand would be placed.
Set Dressing & Set Texturing
Unreal Shot Setup
A WIP of shot building progress in Unreal.