Mesa

Overview

For the opening of the newly built City Hall in Mesa, Arizona, our team was commissioned to create a moving-image habitat inspired by the landscapes and nature surrounding the city. The piece guides viewers through a journey of eons — geological time compressed into a slow procession of forms.

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

Pipeline

The piece is grounded in the actual terrain around Mesa. The team built a procedural pipeline that takes real satellite data, derives landscape geometry from it, and drives the final Unreal render through a custom material library — so each playback session is unique while remaining tied to the place itself.

Source → geometry

The first tile is real Mesa-area satellite imagery — the topography of the land surrounding the City Hall. The following tiles are landscape geometries derived from that source via the Gaea Houdini plugin — heightfield erosion, sedimentation, and flow simulation tuned to match the desert-mesa character of the site.

Mesa-area satellite map and Gaea-derived landscape geometries

8K daynamic tessellation rendered in Unreal Engine

Render → animation

The final image is driven by a custom Unreal Landscape Material Pack I built: bespoke shaders, procedural geographic animations, and runtime parameters authored to keep a consistent look across the loop while the underlying geometry varies per session.