Astra

Astra is a new neighborhood of home lots in Summerlin. In the Summerlin sales gallery it is a site of its own: the same iPad that drives the Summerlin masterplan loads Astra separately, and agents use it to walk buyers through the lots.

The masterplan model came from an outside studio; Astra’s I built from the ground up — terrain, planting, lots and look — first as a standalone prototype from December 2025 to March 2026, then inside the production project.

Terrain

The ground is real. After testing Cesium and Blender GIS, I took USGS elevation data through Terrain Sculptor into an Unreal Landscape, then added point-cloud rock cliffs, gullies and the road network on top of it.

On that landscape, Megascans assets and landscape materials carry the detail: the desert foliage, the red rock outcrops and the trails are built to read as the real ground around Astra.

Planting and light

The desert is planted with 54 foliage types across 17 local species — acacia, saltbush, desert cotton, yucca and more — with PCG grass and rocks filling the ground between them. A dynamic sky gives morning, noon and twilight presets with moving cloud shadows. In a later pass the studio Hey Mister placed the trees, laid out the trailhead and reworked the sky, and the planting around the lots was done together with Bart Seifert.

Lots

Each of the 44 lots is its own mesh, numbered and colored by status — available, sold, selected, or a future parcel — so the tablet can highlight any of them. Walls, roads, the guardhouse and the clubhouse, brought in from Revit through Datasmith, sit against a backdrop of the Las Vegas skyline.

Into production

In March 2026 the prototype moved into the Summerlin project on Unreal Engine 5.7, with World Partition, Lumen, Nanite and virtual shadow maps. When the tablet asks for Astra, its level streams in and the renderer switches to settings tuned for this site; turning occlusion queries off removed a stutter during fast orbits.