Minor·Aug 14, 2026

Natsura 0.7.1.0

Highly experimental release containing many untested features and significant under-the-hood changes to the decorations pipeline

Highly experimental release containing many untested features and significant under-the-hood changes to the decorations pipeline

Highlights

This is an experimental build. The decorations pipeline has been substantially reworked under the hood and much of it is untested. Keep your 0.7.0.x install alongside it.
Bud — a new growth component covering spawn interval, whorl angle, multiplicity, offset and phyllotaxy in one node.
Shape — a new node that takes a stack of weighted shape effectors, each mappable, with break control.
Nanite/USD export now keeps material bindings on instanced prototypes. Previously only the trunk arrived bound; every prototype came through with an empty binding.
Multi-tree exports now write one wind sidecar per tree instead of a single merged file covering all of them.
Houdini 22 support. Natsura previously failed to start on H22 — no desktop, no logging, no background service, and no error to say why.
Clicking around a heavy scene is roughly 6x faster (~3.8s to ~0.6s per selection on a 1,008-node scene).

New package layout. The root of the download now holds only what you click, read or edit; the machinery lives in setup/. Setup creates a real shortcut for your platform — .lnk on Windows, an .app bundle on macOS, a .desktop entry on Linux.
launch.conf is plain KEY=VALUE, with every key documented in README.txt.
Bud, Shape, Map Wrangle and Invoke Effector appear in the tab menu under Natsura/, Natsura/Core and Natsura/Utility.

natsura::bud::1.0 — Natsura Bud. Growth component with spawn seed and interval, whorl angle and multiplicity, spawn offset, and phyllotaxy. Takes terminal, lateral and prune graph inputs, and hosts effectors and decorators.
natsura::shape::1.0 — Natsura Shape. Hosts a stack of shape effectors, each with a weight that can be a value or a map, plus an Allow Breaks toggle.
natsura::map_wrangle::1.0 — Natsura Map Wrangle. A bare VEX field for writing a map directly.
natsura::invoke_effector::1.0 — Natsura Invoke Effector. Runs a stack of effector snippets against a group, precompiled by default, with the header and template exposed when it isn't.
natsura::prestitch_temp::1.0 — STRANDS. Work in progress and unstable. Expect it to change or disappear.

create_nanite_assembly Material targeting is now pattern-based rather than a frozen list of paths, so it survives renaming the asset, changing the tree count and changing the prototype count. The list refreshes itself immediately before every export.
unreal_wind Wind data is compiled per tree rather than for the whole geometry. Each connected tree gets its own payload; the compiler version is now 2.0.
export_json Writes one file per tree, named <asset>_<n>_wind.json.
export_unreal_nanite_assembly Updated alongside the wind and material changes.
Decoration pipeline rebuild — updated: Assembly Decoration, Clusters Decoration, Core Decorate, Surface Decoration, Rebuild Primitive Attributes, Spline Reduce, Atlas Material.
Effectors — updated: Autocode Effector, Effector Template, Deflection Effector, Magnet Effector, Noise Effector.
Mapping — updated: Map, Map Attribute, Map Constant, Mapping Template, Core Wrangle.
Growth and rigging — updated: Grow, Core Grow, Simulate, Execute Logic, Instancify, Rig to Assembly, Identify Shared Instances, Import Speedtree.

create_nanite_assembly Materials did not come through on instanced prototypes. 36 of 38 bindings were being dropped at the reference boundary; only the trunks survived.
create_nanite_assembly The material list went empty or stale after a rename or a change in tree count, and nothing refilled it.
export_json Booleans were written as 1 and 0 instead of true and false.
export_json Duplicate Root and root joints both survived into the sidecar.
export_json An empty Name now raises an error instead of writing a mysteriously named file.
unreal_wind Multi-tree exports wrote a single merged sidecar covering every tree in the scene.
Natsura did not start at all under Houdini 22, silently. H22 uses Python 3.13 and only 3.10 and 3.11 were shipped.
Starting Houdini with an empty scene could spawn a Natsura geo node with Grow and Simulate in it.
Windows install failed — setup.bat called a setup.ps1 that was not in the archive.
Linux and macOS install failed — setup.sh shipped with Windows line endings.

The startup sequence lives in one place now, with the per-Python-version entry points reduced to shims. Supporting a new Houdini version is a file copy rather than a third copy of the logic to keep in sync.
Hotkeys persist nothing. The dead file-based loader and its shipped config file have been removed; bindings resolve live on each keypress.
Includes everything from 0.7.0.3. If you never successfully installed that one, its fixes are here.

Experimental build. The decoration pipeline changes are largely untested and regressions are likely.
create_nanite_assembly Material bindings are written into the root layer, not into the per-tree assemblies/*.usda. If you load an assembly layer standalone it will have no bindings.
create_nanite_assembly If an existing hip has Allow Editing of Contents on the node, use Match Current Definition after updating or the material fix will not reach it.
unreal_wind Gust attenuation, root stub, ground cover and emit mode are internal and not reachable from the node interface.
USD exports write upAxis = "Y". Unreal is Z-up.
The macOS .app bundle is untested and carries a generic icon.
prestitch_temp is a scratch node, not a feature.

Settling the decorations pipeline rework and getting the new Bud and Shape nodes tested and documented.

Natsura 0.7.0.3

Fixed bugs across rigging, wrangling and viewer states. Some small performance improvements.