Interface

Before building your first tree, it's worth a quick tour of the Natsura interface: the first-run choices you'll be asked to make, and where everything lives. If you haven't installed yet, start with Installation.

First-run choices

The first time Natsura launches you'll see a splash screen and a Welcome to Natsura dialog. It asks two things, both reversible later:

• Enable Natsura hotkeys?
• Send anonymous analytics to help improve Natsura? The full privacy policy is linked from the dialog, and you can inspect exactly what gets sent.

At the bottom-right of the Natsura interface (when the Natsura desktop is active) two small status buttons let you change your mind at any time:

• Keyboard icon, green when hotkeys are on, grey when off.
• Analytics orb, a green dot when analytics are running. Expand it to see when the session started, read the privacy policy, inspect the exact log being sent, and enable or disable analytics.

Visual pending.

The splash screen

The splash is a quick way to start projects, open examples, and reach documentation. It ties into Natsura's project-saving feature, which stores a thumbnail and metadata with every scene. You can disable the splash in settings if you'd rather not see it on startup.

Visual pending.

The Natsura desktop

Natsura launches Houdini with the Natsura desktop, a reorganised Houdini layout with the standard panels plus a few new ones. If you're new to Houdini, the core three are:

• 3D viewport on the left.
• Parameter pane in the centre.
• Network (node) view on the right.

All Natsura panels can be docked as regular Houdini Python panels; the desktop is a starting arrangement, not a lock-in.

Visual pending.

The Natsura workspace

The most important addition sits below the network view. It has two parts:

• A toolbar giving quick access to the most-used Natsura nodes. You choose which menus are pinned here; Attribute and Spans are two of the most useful (covered later).
• A multimodal panel below it that switches between several views.

The guide panel

The default panel view is a context-sensitive guide that explains whatever you're currently interacting with in Natsura.

• Click Read more to expand a topic.
• Pin the view to turn off context sensitivity, then switch to the tree view to browse and search topics yourself, or search keywords and click the help icon to jump to these full docs.
• At the bottom, related topics let you hop left/right between subjects.
• Collapse the bar for a minimal toolbar-only view, or right-click → Pop out guide as floating panel.

Visual pending.

The display toolbar

At the top of the workspace is the display toolbar: quick controls for how Natsura renders the tree in the viewport (geometry colour, smooth shading, preview meshes), some network-view context options, and other display options.

The Natsura logo at its top-right opens the rest of the Natsura panels:

• Examples, a hub of example files to get you running fast.
• Projects, your recent saved projects with thumbnails, organised into collections and favourites, showing which Houdini/Natsura version each was saved with (requires project tracking enabled).
• Feedback, tell the team what you think.
• Settings, toggle the splash screen, project tracking, and more.
• Welcome, the welcome page again.

Visual pending.

The Natsura menu

At the very top of Houdini's main menu bar there's a Natsura menu, with the settings already mentioned plus more advanced options:

• Check for Updates.
• Change License.
• Debugging info to send to support when asked.
• Upgrade Scene, only relevant when opening scenes saved with older Natsura versions.

Visual pending.

Next

You've got your bearings; now grow something. Continue to Your First Tree.