Mesa

For the opening of Mesa's new City Hall, a moving-image habitat inspired by the landscape around the city. It is built from the real terrain data of that landscape.

A landscape that runs on geological time: eons of erosion, sedimentation, and bloom compressed into a slow procession of forms.

Getting the terrain in at full fidelity

Satellite data for the ground around the City Hall goes through the Gaea Houdini plugin, which erodes and weathers it into the desert-mesa character of the site.

The problem is what happens next. A terrain carrying that much detail is far too heavy to hand to Unreal as geometry, and decimating it to something shippable throws away exactly the erosion detail the piece is about.

So it does not travel as geometry. The Houdini heightfield is exported as a texture and rebuilt inside Unreal through dynamic tessellation and Nanite, at whatever density the camera needs. The camera can sit close enough to read a single eroded channel and pull back to the whole range without the image coming apart.

My part sits on top: a custom Unreal Landscape Material Pack of shaders and procedural geographic animation, parameterised so one look survives geometry that is different every session.

Variations

1 / 5