Overview
Natsura is a procedural foliage toolkit that runs inside Houdini. You can use it to grow trees, shrubs, grasses, ivy, and other growing things, and because it's a flexible growing system it can do more than just plants.
It grows a plant from a graph you build, through a growth-cycle simulation rather than step-by-step procedural modelling: you're not deforming a skeleton or scattering geometry on top of one, you're growing the plant from the perspective of a bud that elongates and splits. The goal is to pair that growth with the responsiveness of a parametric modelling tool and plenty of direct controls in the viewport.
New here? Start with Your First Tree. Otherwise jump straight to the area you need below.
Visual pending.
Who it's for
- Artists who want to model foliage procedurally without leaving Houdini, working in the viewport and on parameters.
- Technical artists and programmers who want to go deeper, composing the underlying verbs and VEX into new growth behaviour.
- Studios and pipelines building libraries of plants to ship into engines.
The core concepts
Natsura is built on the growth simulation, and shaping is the other side of it: reaching into that growth to control the form. From there, the meshing tools turn the grown skeleton into geometry, and the foliage and instancing tools build out leaves and canopies. Most people start with simulation and shaping, and drill into the rest as they need it.
Simulation
The growth simulation: the graph and its core verbs, how a plant is grown, and the endless variation one recipe produces.
Shaping
Controlling the form: mapping, effectors, the environment a tree responds to, and the interactive tools for reaching in by hand.
For getting a finished plant into engine, see Unreal.
Getting started
Features
Mapping
Drive any parameter by attribute, and build your own behaviours instead of relying on fixed UIs.
Effectors
Per-point vector attributes that steer growth with directional and environmental influence.
Decorations
Assign meshing processes to parts of the skeleton without splitting streams or cluttering the graph.
Trait System
How Natsura decides which library asset goes where, through matched attributes on both sides of a placement.
Materials
Bark and leaf surfaces, baked high-poly detail, and the Copernicus pass that ties them together.
Atlas Workflow
Import 2D leaf and texture atlases and turn them into ingredients for the meshing system.
Going further
Pointers into the rest of the docs. Each goes to the place to start in that area, not to every page.
Unreal
Extend Natsura
For technical artists and programmers composing the core verbs into their own behaviour.