Materials

How Natsura handles the surface look of a tree: bark and leaf materials, baked high-poly detail, and the Copernicus pass that ties them together.

Material is the surface look of a tree: the colour, roughness, and relief of bark, and the colour and translucency of leaves. In Natsura the look is authored separately from the meshing, so the same skeleton can be re-skinned with a different material and the same material reused across trees. This is an active development area; it covers the standard surfacing channels today and will do more as the surfacing system matures toward 1.0.

Visual pending.

Materials break into a few areas:

Surface

Bark and branch surfaces, and the reusable Surface Resource they wear.

Atlas

Leaf materials derived from atlas images, including the two-sided gotcha.

Copernicus

Editing baked and atlas maps in Houdini's COPs without leaving the app.

Bake

Capturing scan and high-poly detail as texture maps.

How materials reach the engine

On export, materials travel as references and the baked maps feed the engine-side material directly. After renaming an export, re-run Auto Fill Materials or the material paths break: the single most common cause of a material-less tree in Unreal. See Export Unreal Nanite Assembly.

Maturing toward 1.0. Texture blending, per-attribute bark variation (age, damage, exposure), and strands-based vascular surfacing are in development and not shipped yet. Today the surface material covers the standard PBR channels plus displacement.

Trait System

Encoding selection in matched attributes on both sides of a placement. Natsura's mechanism for deciding which library asset goes where on a tree.

Surface Materials

Bark and branch surfaces: the Surface Resource that supplies colour, normal, roughness, and displacement, worn by the surface and trunk decorations.