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Import Highpoly

Import Highpoly brings a high-resolution scan or sculpt into Natsura, trims it, and marks the open ends where procedural growth will continue from it.

Import Highpoly brings a high-resolution scan or sculpt, usually a trunk, into Natsura. It assigns the textures, trims away the parts you don't want, and marks the open ends (profiles) where procedural growth will continue from the scan. It's the first node of the scan workflow, on the Natsura toolbar under Scans.

To keep the viewport responsive, the node shows the scan as a point cloud, and the full mesh is only processed when it's needed.

The wizard

Press Enter in the viewport with the node selected (or press the button at the top of its parameters) to start the wizard. In Auto mode the Phase strip shows where you are, Back and Continue move between steps, and each step's folder appears as you reach it:

  1. Import Geometry: pick the file in Source File. A big scan takes a while to load.
  2. Import Textures: set the colour, roughness, normal and height textures under Material.
  3. Transform: check the scale and rotation, and fix them with Rotate and Scale.
  4. Trim Geometry: select the points you want to keep, then press Enter. A front orthographic view helps.
  5. Pick Profiles: select the faces at the open ends where growth should continue, then press Enter to finish. A perspective view helps.

Esc cancels. Mode set to Advanced shows every folder at once, so you can fill in the same fields by hand.

Outputs

Proxy carries the scan, and Profiles the ends you picked. Wire both into Create Graft Mesh, Proxy into its first input and Profiles into its second.

Large scans

A 64 GB machine handles scans of about 16 million polygons before memory becomes the limit. In Advanced mode, the Cache folder under Inputs sets the Geometry Cache file for the imported scan (in $HIP/geo/ by default), as uncompressed .bgeo for faster loading or .bgeo.sc for a smaller file. Also in Advanced mode, Proxy Settings thins the point cloud preview: Proxy Reduction Mode is None by default, and Point Spacing or Keep % of Points reduce it. If a scan's mesh needs cleaning up, turn on Mesh Requires Cleanup under Advanced and set the Fuse Distance.

Related

Trunk Extension walks through the whole workflow. The steps inside the wizard are also nodes of their own: Scan Material, Scan to Parts (Trim Geometry) and Scan Profiles (Pick Profiles).

Grow Draw

Bring hand-drawn curves into Natsura with the Custom Module node, so they can be decorated and reshaped like a tree you grew. Experimental.

Identify Shared Instances

Identify Shared Instances finds the pieces of a model that are copies of one another and names them, so they can be kept as shared parts. Import Assembly and Rig to Assembly use it internally; it is hidden from the Tab menu.