Natsura 0.5.5 – Natsura Is Available for Commercial Use

Natsura Is Now Available for Commercial Use

With Natsura 0.5.5, you can:

• buy licenses
• plug Natsura into your Houdini pipeline
• ship real, commercial work

Studios and individual artists already use Natsura in production.
This release formally confirms that commercial use is supported.

Natsura 0.5.5 is an early-access version. Features will move, naming will improve, and documentation will grow as more people use it. The aim is to open up powerful foliage workflows to a wider range of Houdini users, not just specialists.

If you are already working in Houdini, or planning to, Natsura gives you a dedicated plant and foliage system that lives inside that ecosystem.

Requirements for Commercial Use

Natsura is a plugin for SideFX Houdini, not a standalone application.

To use Natsura 0.5.5 commercially you need:

1. A compatible Houdini installation (Apprentice / Indie / Core / FX)
2. A valid Houdini license from SideFX
3. A Natsura license: Apprentice, Indie, Pro, or Studio

In short:

• Houdini controls your commercial rights and export options.
• Natsura extends Houdini with a foliage toolkit on top.

You cannot use Natsura without Houdini. Natsura does not replace a Houdini license.

For the detailed matrix of “which Natsura tier + which Houdini edition = what am I allowed to do?”, see:

• Commercial Use & License Requirements

Early-Access Status of 0.5.5

Natsura 0.5.5 is intended for:

• real projects, including production work
• learning and R&D, including for people who are still getting comfortable with Houdini

You do not need to be a Houdini expert to start. You do need to be willing to:

• follow examples and documentation
• work with tools that are still evolving
• give feedback when something is confusing or missing

What "Early Access" Really Means

You should expect:

• There are bugs. Some workflows are smooth; others are still rough around the edges.
• There are missing features and places where the UX is clearly "v0.5" and not final.
• There are performance issues, sometimes in surprising places. Natsura can handle huge detail and scale, but some "simple" interactions (tweaking parameters, viewport updates, certain graph edits) can take longer than you'd reasonably expect.
• Documentation, learning content, and parameter tooltips are incomplete or out of date in places. Many nodes and workflows are documented. Some are covered only by examples or short notes.
• Things will change: workflows, node layouts, naming, and best practices are still evolving.

Many of these issues have straightforward fixes and optimisations, and we are actively working through them. We aim to release a new early-access build every couple of months - that's a target, not a promise.

If you need a completely locked-down, zero-change, fully documented solution for a massive production right now, you should either:

• use Natsura in a well-contained part of your pipeline, or
• wait for a later version of Natsura where more of the rough edges have been hammered out.

If you're comfortable with some rough edges in exchange for cutting-edge workflows and direct access to the people building the tool, early access is what you want.

Who 0.5.5 Is For (and Who It Is Not For)

This release is for

• Early adopters, trailblazers, and explorers who like being ahead of the curve and don't mind filing bug reports.
• Artists learning Houdini who want a structured way into procedural foliage.
• Technical artists and environment artists who want deep procedural control rather than fixed black-box tools.
• Studios at the start of a project's lifetime - pre-production, prototyping, vertical slices, or early content development.
• Teams building new pipelines around Nanite, Houdini, and Unreal, who are happy to adapt as both Natsura and Unreal evolve.

This release is not for

• Teams in late production on a large title who need everything to be stable, documented, and frozen.
• Pipelines that cannot tolerate change in tools or workflows over the next 6–12 months.
• Teams expecting a "drop-in, never-think-about-it-again" plugin that behaves like a battle-tested 1.0 with ten years of polish.

If you're in late-stage production on something big, we'd rather you use Natsura carefully in a small, scoped area, or simply wait for a later version, than gamble your milestone on a 0.x.

Why Houdini Is the Right Foundation

Natsura is built for Houdini, not bolted onto it.

That means:

• Natsura lives inside the Houdini ecosystem - it talks to SOPs, VEX, attributes, USD, PDG, and your own HDAs like a native citizen.
• The same graphs and data structures that drive your foliage can connect to layout, FX, scattering, simulation, and world-building in the rest of your pipeline.
• You can treat Natsura as a first-class building block in your own tools, not a black box you have to work around.

In the right hands, this makes Natsura one of the most flexible and powerful foliage tools on the market. You get the full expressive power of Houdini, plus a foliage system designed specifically to exploit it.

At the same time, UX is a huge priority for us. The long-term goal is simple:

to make Natsura the foliage tool of choice for artists and studios working with Houdini and Unreal.

Early access is where we push the underlying systems and workflows hard; over time, you'll see that power wrapped in better defaults, clearer UX, and more approachable entry points for artists who aren't full-time TDs.

Why Studios Are Using It Already

Studios and independent artists are choosing Natsura early because it changes what is practical to do inside Houdini.

At a high level, Natsura provides:

• a growth simulation system for plants
• a graph-based toolkit for shaping and guiding that growth
• a meshing and export layer tuned for real production use

Highlights in 0.5.5

A few examples of what Natsura can do today:

• Simulate real growth
  Plants react to light, shade, and obstacles using a node-based grammar system for growth rules. See Simulation.
• Pose branches during growth
  Adjust branch shapes interactively without throwing away the simulation, and see meshing update in place. See Pose branches.
• Deform millions of polygons efficiently
  Cluster-based decorations let you bend and align dense branch and leaf clusters while keeping performance usable for real work. See Decorations.
• Drag-and-drop meshing with Decorations
  A dedicated Decorations layer replaces ad-hoc node networks, so trunk, bark, leaf cards, and clusters are assembled cleanly instead of through group and split chains.
• Extend scanned trunks into full trees
  Turn scanned hero trunks into complete, animatable trees, blending procedural structure and scan data. See Extend scanned trunks.
• Work from single trees to entire forests
  Use point-driven setups and attributes to build reusable “recipes” that scale from one asset to full ecosystems. See Work at scale.
• Create Nanite foliage for Unreal
  Export Nanite-ready trees and skeletal assemblies to Unreal Engine with dedicated tools and wizards, and optionally run parts of the workflow in-editor via Houdini Engine. See Create Nanite foliage.

For teams that want Houdini to be the centre of their vegetation pipeline, these capabilities make it possible to keep more of the work in one place, with less hand-built glue.

Industry Adoption

Natsura is already being used in industry, including games, visual effects, and simulation.

Recent versions of the tools have seen major improvements thanks to studios testing Natsura in real production and giving us honest feedback. We owe major thanks to our friends at Warhorse, Dead Astronauts, Q3D, Realbiomes, and Coolant for being the first to put their trust in us and what we are building.

We'd also like to thank the many individual testers and members of the Natsura community Discord for their continued support, bug reports, suggestions, and general chaos.

Early-Access Pricing

Because Natsura is in early access, licenses are currently priced lower than they will be once more of the roadmap is delivered, and they come with more generous upgrade rights:

• To reflect the inherent risk in working with early-stage tools, early adopters pay less than future customers.
• For a limited time only, perpetual licenses will cover all 0.x and 1.x updates.
• Later on, perpetual licenses will revert to the usual "one major version + minor updates" model.

Early adopters are helping us shape the tool, and we're giving them better pricing and longer upgrade coverage in return.

Early Access pricing is discounted ("Early Bird") for all subscription tiers. Prices will revert to standard rates for all subscribers when we leave Early Access (1.0 release); we'll notify you 30 days beforehand. Perpetual licenses are one-time purchases and unaffected.

Licensing Options

Free Apprentice licenses are available for non-commercial use, and there are several commercial license tiers: Indie, Pro, and Studio. The goal is to be fair to individuals and businesses, and we believe our pricing scale reflects the value proposition of Natsura at each level.

Indie Users

Individuals who earn less than $100,000 a year can purchase an Indie license, which is compatible with Houdini Indie. We offer monthly, yearly, and perpetual licenses.

A perpetual license means that the version of Natsura which you purchase, plus all minor version upgrades, is yours to keep and use forever. For example:

• If you buy Natsura 1.0, you get every 1.x version until we release 2.0.
• During our early-access period only, perpetual buyers get every 0.x and 1.x version of Natsura - effectively two major version lines for the price of one.

Pro Users

For professionals and small teams earning between $100,000 and $1,000,000 per year, our Pro tier offers the same feature set as Indie with pricing that reflects the increased revenue threshold.

Pro licenses include up to 3 seats and standard support, with the same monthly, yearly, and perpetual options available.

Studio Users

Studios with revenue or funding of $1,000,000 or more can access our Studio tier, which includes:

• up to 6 seats,
• priority support with faster response times.

Studio licenses are available as yearly subscriptions or perpetual licenses.

For organizations requiring more than 6 seats, hosted/platform use, or more bespoke arrangements, Enterprise agreements are available with custom support and pricing.

In Plain Language: What You Can and Can't Do

When you register and/or purchase a license, you'll be asked to agree to the full Natsura EULA. Here's the simplified version in human language:

• You can make and sell assets. You own the trees, plants, foliage, worlds, and other assets you create with Natsura. You can use them in games and films, sell them to clients, and put them on marketplaces. We do not charge royalties on that.
• You cannot sell Natsura itself. You can't sell or give away the Natsura tools, HDAs, presets, graphs, scripts, or any part of the toolkit that would let someone else "have Natsura" without their own license.
• You can use AI in your pipeline. It's fine to use AI tools alongside Natsura (for layout, design assistance, content selection, etc.), and it's fine to run inference on your own assets.
• You cannot train competing tree tools on Natsura output without a deal. If you want to train or fine-tune AI models directly on content made with Natsura - especially to build a model whose job is to generate trees/foliage in place of Natsura - that requires a separate AI Use License from us.
• You can run Natsura inside your own studio or pipeline. Freelancers, teams, and studios can use Natsura on their own machines and servers to deliver work to clients, as long as only licensed users actually run Natsura.
• Hosted platforms are possible, but only under a custom agreement. If you want to build a hosted world-generation or content-generation service where your users press a button and Natsura runs in the background, that's an Enterprise / bespoke licensing discussion, not covered by the standard tiers.
• Tiers and commercial use. Apprentice is non-commercial only. Indie, Pro, Studio, and Enterprise can all be used for paid work, within their revenue/funding and seat limits.
• How licensing and connectivity work (for now). Licenses are node-locked: one Seat = one machine at a time, with limited moves. There is no floating/network license server. For now, Natsura needs to talk to the online activation service while you use it; there is no fully offline mode.

For the exact legal wording, definitions, and edge cases, please read the full EULA during registration and see the Commercial Use & License Requirements page.

Getting Started

Ready to start creating?

• Visit our pricing page to view current rates and purchase options.
• Or sign up for a free Apprentice account to try Natsura with Houdini Apprentice (non-commercial use).

If you have questions about licensing, AI training use-cases, hosted platforms, or Enterprise options, contact us at support@natsura.com (mailto:support@natsura.com).

Natsura 0.5.5 is under active development and will keep changing. If you are interested in growing with the tool as it evolves, rather than waiting for a static version, we would be happy to have you on board.