Natsura vs building it yourself

If you have Houdini in the pipeline, the thought comes up sooner or later:

“We’ll just build our own foliage HDAs. How hard can it be?”

Here’s the short answer:

• We’ve built three foliage systems.
• Each serious attempt took years, not months.
• The first two? Technically interesting, painful to work with.
• The third one became Natsura — and it’s still a full-time product, not a side project.

From where we’re standing now, the honest view is:

Unless you already have a great in-house system that isn’t overdue a refactor,
no new commercial project should choose to build a full vegetation engine from scratch.

Natsura exists so you can stop trying to write the same engine everyone else is silently struggling with, and focus on the parts that actually make your games and films different.

1. Prototype vs product: two very different problems

Internal tools usually start like this:

• A tech artist throws together some clever HDAs.
• People are impressed, some levels ship, morale is high.
• You call it “our foliage system”.

At that point, three things quietly become your problem:

• Owning a growth model – rules, structure, variation, simulation.
• Owning a meshing and performance model – LODs, atlases, cards, trunks, wind, Nanite-style densities.
• Owning the boring parts – docs, training, support, pipeline glue, backwards compatibility.

The experimental graph was the fun bit.
The long tail of maintenance is what you’ve really signed up for.

Big studios know this. They pour years into foliage and worldbuilding systems, and they still kill or restart them when they don’t hit the bar. That’s with dedicated tools teams.

If you’re not planning to fund that level of long-term ownership, building “your own engine” is just taking on debt.

2. Time and salary vs a license

Run the numbers.

• A good tools engineer or senior tech artist is easily 5–6 figures per year in total cost.
• Serious foliage R&D is multi-year if you want something robust, controllable, and pleasant to use.
• You don’t just pay for coding. You pay for debugging, refactors, “quick requests” from art, and training every new hire on your system.

Against that, Natsura offers:

• Clear, published pricing. /pricing
• Multiple tiers (Indie, Pro, Studio, Enterprise) with seat caps designed around actual team sizes.
• Subscription or perpetual, depending on how you like to budget.

One person’s time for a year can buy a lot of Natsura.

If you wouldn’t seriously assign a dedicated team for 2–3 years to “foliage engine”,
then it’s hard to justify not buying one that already exists.

3. What Natsura actually saves you from building

Natsura is not a pretty HDA pack. Under the artist-facing UI, there is a full engine:

• A growth graph system with deferred evaluation:
  • Graph-building nodes – Grow, Split, Repeat, Switch.
  • A compiled Apex graph of internodes, attributes, and sockets.
  • Simulate – one controlled execution pass that resolves mappings, effectors, and decorations.
    /docs/overview · /docs/core-concepts/simulation
• A layered node system:
  • Wrappers for artists – Grow, Repeat, Split, Switch, Prune, Wrangle. /docs/wrappers
  • Core nodes for technical users – Grow Core, Repeat Core, Split Core, Switch Core, Wrangle Core, Kill Core. /docs/nodes/core-nodes

And around that engine:

• Decorations – a meshing system that keeps growth and geometry cleanly separated. /docs/meshing/decorations
• Mapping – a framework to drive parameters over space/time with attribute chains, instead of wiring noise everywhere by hand. /docs/mapping
• Effectors – gravity, light/phototropism, balance, and experimental collisions, feeding into growth behaviour. /docs/effectors
• Atlas & scan workflows – texture atlases, de-lighting, baking, scan stitching, highpoly processing.
• UE5 / Nanite flows – Nanite-ready meshes, skeletal assemblies, and export helpers.

You could create versions of each piece internally. You will then own:

• An engine,
• An authoring layer,
• A meshing and export layer,
• A documentation and training problem.

Natsura’s whole purpose is to take that off your plate.

4. Controlled simulation, not “press sim and pray”

The seductive idea: “we’ll simulate plant growth, it’ll look super natural”.

The reality: if simulation fights the artist, it gets turned off.

Natsura’s core premise is:

Complete artist control, all the time, with all the power of simulation when you want it.

Practically:

• Grow behaves like a modelling operator:
  • One step of growth, optionally looped and forked.
  • A parameter set that maps directly to shape: length, width, spirals, forks.
  • Sockets you can leave as simple sliders or promote to mappings later.
• You can pose branches by hand, redirect forms, and see meshing update live.

• Simulation is deferred: you describe rules and structure first, Simulate runs them in a controlled pass when you’re ready. /docs/core-concepts/simulation
• When you need complexity, you promote parameters to Mappings and optionally bring in Effectors for gravity, light, balance, collisions.

If you build your own system, getting this balance right — between hands-on control and real simulation — is where most of the difficulty hides. We’ve already been through that loop. Twice.

5. Extend everything, don’t replace your pipeline

The usual argument for building in-house is “we need to extend it in special ways”.

Good. You should.

Natsura is deliberately designed to be extended rather than walled off:

• Open, modular structure – Wrappers are built from core nodes; most of the logic is visible, tweakable, and forkable.
• VEX and custom logic – Wrangle lets you emit attributes, gates, and effectors into the growth graph without breaking the deferred model.

We explicitly support:

• Rolling your own meshing processes on top of or alongside Decorations (custom LOD flows, trunk/branch card generators, scan workflows).
• Integrating custom wind systems and engine-specific wind setups.
• Adding VEX helpers, Python scripts, and pipeline utilities.
• Building your own wrappers and presets for species, biomes, or house styles.
• Writing engine glue: exporters, importers, validation tools.

Think of Natsura as:

The foliage engine you plug your studio’s ideas into,
not a black box you have to work around.

6. Asset libraries and ecosystems, not one-off graphs

Home-grown tools often plateau at “good enough for this project”. Then:

• The champion leaves or gets promoted,
• Everyone’s slightly scared to touch the core HDAs,
• The next project hacks around the old system instead of building on it.

Natsura is built so you can actually accumulate value:

• Recipes built with Grow / Split / Switch / Simulate can express species definitions, age variation, biomes, and art direction, not just individual hero trees.

• The same graph can output dozens or thousands of variations by changing seeds, mappings, or effectors, instead of duplicating HDAs.
• On paid tiers, the resulting assets are yours to ship, sell, and monetise under a clear EULA. /terms-and-conditions
• Because it’s Houdini-based, you can version and share recipes as you would any other HDA or digital asset.

Internal R&D should culminate in libraries and systems that outlive individual projects.
Natsura is there to be that stable layer.

7. People leave. Your engine shouldn’t leave with them.

This is the quiet killer of in-house tools.

With a fully custom vegetation stack:

• Knowledge clusters around one or two “foliage people”.
• Onboarding new hires means teaching your system before they even get to foliage craft.
• Any serious refactor fights against production schedules and usually loses.

With Natsura:

• The concepts, docs, and examples are shared across many studios and freelancers.
• You can hire people who already know Natsura — or can learn it from public resources.
• You’re not the only ones reporting bugs, asking for features, or stress-testing workflows.

You still need internal expertise. But that expertise is spent on how your studio uses the engine, not on keeping the engine alive every time someone changes jobs.

8. Support, collaboration, and why timing matters

We take support seriously for a simple reason: early-access tools live or die on it.

A few things that matter if you’re betting on us instead of building in-house:

• We enjoy working with teams — teaching, pair-debugging, doing workshops, helping you map “how you think about trees” into Natsura graphs.
• We want studios to push back, complain, and ask for better workflows. A lot of Natsura’s roadmap comes directly from those conversations.
• We know support is part of the product. We want studios to feel that when something breaks or blocks them, someone actually cares and helps.

Right now, in Early Access:

• You get the highest-touch support we will ever be able to sustainably offer.
• Your use-cases and feedback land exactly where they can still reshape features.
• You help define what “production-ready vegetation tools in Houdini” will look like in a few years.

If you were going to influence a tool that might sit in your pipeline for a decade, this is the moment to do it.

9. Houdini-native, ecosystem-friendly

Buying Natsura is not a vote against Houdini experimentation. It’s the opposite.

Natsura lives in Houdini:

• SOP context, attributes, VEX, HDAs — the usual rules apply.
• It plays with SideFX Labs, USD, terrain, scattering, your own HDAs, and other foliage plugins.
• You can use Natsura for what it’s good at (growth, structure, meshing), and still bring other tools into the picture for layout, terrain, or engine-specific magic.

The point is not to make you dependent.
The point is to stop you sinking years into plumbing so you can spend that energy on content and systems that actually move the needle.

10. Who actually should build everything themselves?

Realistically, the list is very short.

You should consider building a full vegetation engine from scratch only if:

• You already have a mature internal system that genuinely works well,
  and it isn’t screaming for a rewrite; or
• You are prepared to fund a dedicated team to own it for many years (engine + tools + support),
  and you have clear, concrete reasons why Natsura’s architecture cannot be extended to fit your needs.

If you’re not in one of those two buckets, the honest answer is:

You shouldn’t be building a foliage engine in 2025.
You should be building on one.

11. Next steps