LUMA
3D Projection Mapping
Digital, Art Direction & Design
A century-old facade,
turned into a canvas of light.
LUMA is an outdoor 3D projection-mapping spectacle — animated art thrown across a historic downtown building, fitted precisely to every arch, window and cornice, for a crowd of thousands after dark. Getting light to land exactly where it belongs starts long before showtime. Here's how the world gets built.
First, reconstruct the building.
The facade is rebuilt as a photoreal 3D model — every moulding, arch and brick — then dressed with a full PBR material set: albedo, normal, roughness, metallic, ambient occlusion and height. That digital twin becomes the stage. It's where projected light can be pre-visualised wrapping real geometry, hours before a single projector is aimed at the street.
Then, map the architecture.
Each element of the facade is isolated and labelled — arched windows, ground-floor bays, doorways — so animation can be authored against named surfaces instead of guesswork. When a shape needs to crawl up a column or bloom out of a specific window, it's already addressable. This registration map is what keeps projected content locked to the building, frame for frame.
And then, the street lights up.
On the night, the model, the map and the artwork collapse into one thing: a building that breathes, morphs and glows for a packed downtown block. Creatures climb the brickwork, colour pours from the windows, and a hundred phones go up to catch it.
