September 2025Passionate people love to complain about the things they love… and Magic the Gathering players might just be the most passionate people of all.
© Wizards of the Coast
To be fair, there’s 3 art styles for each land, but the point still stands.
In that spirit, here’s a hot take: The Land Station product is awful. It’s a great value. It’s very player friendly. But who wants a deck where all their lands have identical art??
This needs to be fixed…
Introducing the
Slinker Land Station
250 unique art pieces
Fully 3D modeled scenes
Absolutely no AI at any point
Learning to create terrains in Houdini wasn’t easy, which is why Project Pegasus was the place to start.
One Massive Hurdle
Building height field terrains in Houdini only allows for one terrain to be generated at a time. To make this work, the internals of the erosion tools needed to be changed. By controlling how the simulation is run, a new terrain could be generated on every frame of the project, with any number of erosion steps, and with completely new base geometry.
Texture is Everything
Copernicus recently replaced Houdini COPs as the de facto image generation toolset. Unfortunately there are undocumented interactions with height fields, and even rendering bugs on the macOS version, that made previewing the materials impossible. This might have been the end of the project if it wasn’t for some help from Simon Houdini on YouTube and a timely update from SideFX that fixed the rendering bug.
The Final Result
250 fully unique cards rendered over thousands of hours on consumer hardware. Each card is individually numbered using Pixelmator Pro and a custom Apple Script. The final print was done using Make Playing Cards after some final CMYK color tuning.
Let’s Work Together
Tell us about that project you’ve been dying to get off the ground. Physical, digital, or something else entirely, we want to know how we can help bring your vision to life.