Materials

How Natsura handles the look of a tree: Surface Resources for bark and leaves, atlas materials, baked scan detail, and editing maps in Copernicus.

This page is still being worked on. Images and clips are coming soon.

Materials are the look of a tree: the colour, roughness and relief of the bark, and the colour and translucency of the leaves. In Natsura the look is set separately from the meshing, so you can put a different material on the same tree, or the same material on many trees.

Most materials go on through a Surface Resource, which holds a set of texture maps. Wire one into a Surface Decoration for the bark, or add it to an Assembly Resource for leaves and other parts.

Surface

Bark and branch materials, and the Surface Resource that holds them.

Atlas

Leaf materials from atlas images.

Copernicus

Editing texture maps in Houdini's COPs without leaving Houdini.

Bake

Capturing scan and high-poly detail as texture maps.

Materials in Unreal

Export (Solaris) on Export Unreal Nanite Assembly opens SOP Create Nanite Assembly, which lists every material on the tree. Each one can be created in Unreal, named after its Surface Resource or renamed, or linked to a material already in your project. Leaves need a two-sided material in Unreal. See Materials on the Unreal page.

Status

Surface Resources cover colour, roughness, normal and displacement. Trunk Meshing, coming after 0.7.3, adds stacked surfaces such as bark, exposed wood and lichen.

Trait System

How Assembly Decoration chooses which part from the library goes where on the tree: traits, the attributes that live on both the skeleton and the parts, and the chart you place parts on.

Surface Materials

Bark and branch materials: the Surface Resource that holds colour, normal, roughness and displacement, and the decorations that wear it.