Features
Solving Plants in Houdini
A Houdini-based foliage toolset for creating realistic digital vegetation and game-ready trees and plants, designed for artists and production teams in games, film, and creative industries.
Unlock new ways to shape plants
Unlock new ways to shape plants
Tweak and pose individual branches in real time, redirecting live simulations without starting over in this Houdini foliage tool.
Simulate real growth
Simulate real growth
In this procedural vegetation system, just like in the real world, plants respond to light and shade to steer away from obstacles as they grow.
Pose branches
Pose branches
Perfect the final result by posing branches in your Houdini tree generator and see meshing update in an instant.
Instantly deform millions of polys
Instantly deform millions of polys
Bend instanced branch and leaf clusters into place with our Cluster Decorator, which can deform millions of polygons with unparalleled speed for game-ready foliage.
Guide natural processes
Guide natural processes
Place volumes, curves, and guides to attract, repel, limit, or steer growth—set forbidden zones and targets explicitly for procedural trees and plants.
Drag and drop meshing
Drag and drop meshing
No more node spaghetti—in Natsura, foliage meshing is handled by our Decorations system. Forget groups and splitting geometry streams. No more headaches. Just clean execution.
Procedural Trunk Surface
One day we'll try to simulate tree bark, but for now, your best option is our Surface Decorator. Create detailed trunks using heightmaps for highpoly and game-ready trees.
Optimized Meshing
Why waste time optimizing results when you can optimize the process? Natsura aims to produce the right amount of geometry for your foliage from the get-go.
Insane Detail
Our Cluster Decorator can interactively deform millions of polygons in the viewport for dense, high-detail vegetation.
Extend highpoly trunks
Extend highpoly trunks
Turn scanned hero trunks into complete, animatable trees with procedural branches and roots for AAA games and film.
Scan Stitching
Painlessly blend real trees and procedural geometry without visible seams for production foliage.
Process Highpoly Meshes
Work with extremely dense meshes straight out of Reality Capture, interactively in the viewport.
Close the loop
Create watertight geometry out of Natsura simulations, then resimulate to refine your tree and root shapes.
Create geometry from textures
Create geometry from textures
Natsura is designed to be flexible. Work with scans, sculpts, or procedural geometry and foliage textures created directly inside Houdini.
Atlas Textures
A smooth flow to go from raw photos to final results. Directly manipulate, color-grade, and de-light vegetation textures using Copernicus.
Texture Baking
Import heightmaps, extract them directly from scans, or generate them yourself using our Copernicus-based baking process for trunk and leaf detail.
Work at scale
Work at scale
From hero trees to entire forests, keep the same workflow and toolset for scalable game foliage and procedural vegetation.
Build Factories
Pass points laden with attributes from other Houdini systems to Natsura to generate immense variation in trees and plants.
Add Micro Detail
The same tools that make enormous forests possible also facilitate high-detail work on individual assets.
Define Species
Create compact species definitions, with recipes that respond to hyper-parameters such as age, vigor, health, and shade for your vegetation library.
Create Nanite foliage
Create Nanite foliage
Natsura was built with Unreal in mind from the start, and it offers a dedicated workflow to create UE5 Nanite foliage and Nanite skeletal mesh assemblies for trees.
Create Nanite Assemblies
Export rigged trees built for Nanite; import and animate immediately in your Unreal Engine 5 scenes.
Run tools in-engine
Create tools that run live inside Unreal using Houdini Engine, as seen in Project Elderwood, for in-engine foliage authoring.
Create living worlds
Send libraries of trees or entire ecosystems to Unreal in a few clicks using the Unreal Wizard for fast environment art iteration.
Master plants in Houdini
Master plants in Houdini
One of our goals is to make Natsura accessible to everyone, even if you have no prior Houdini experience. If you do, we've got you covered for deep procedural foliage workflows.
Seed Points
Why grow a single tree when you can grow 100 at the same time, or simulate an entire ecosystem? Pass points laden with attributes from other Houdini systems to Natsura.
Understand Attributes
Mapping, Effectors, Wrangles—it's all just attributes. Grasp working with Natsura through its attributes and you're on the way to mastery of procedural vegetation.
Write VEX
Use the Natsura Wrangle to read and write attributes during growth, drive rules, and package custom operators for your environment team.
Mesh it your way
Instead of waiting for us to add to our growing library of Decorations, build your own. Natsura is made to be extended for custom foliage workflows.
And more...
And more...
There are over 100 nodes in the toolkit. Some are experiments which might just become our next priority for AAA foliage and vegetation pipelines.
More manual workflows
Drawing trees and branches... It was there. Now it's not. We put it back in the oven for a bit; we'll let you know when it's back out.
Nested simulations
It's already possible to chain Natsura simulations; we plan on making this easier and more powerful for complex foliage setups.
Growing decoration library
Decals, surface scatters, an even faster leaf solver. Decorations with nested ivy simulations. It's all coming.
Unlimited applications
Get creative—Natsura can be used for much more than tree modelling, from plants and vines to abstract procedural growth.
Scan suite enhancements
Delighting workflows, sculpting, texture stamping. Tell us what you'd like to see next.
Strand simulation
Still a ways off, but if you know some Houdini tricks you can fake it until we make it.
Sign up for Natsura and start creating stunning foliage today
Join the Natsura community and join other artists and developers in the conversation.
Natsura is a tool ready for future developments, breaking with conventions and limitations of the past. The way simulation and guided control is mixed is unique to any other tool I worked with, and allows for modelling plants true to reality like it wasn't possible before. Even if that comes with a bit of a learning curve, I'm convinced it'll be the future of vegetation making!
Tilman Mielsch
Technical Vegetation Artist
Natsura is a groundbreaking new approach to an age old problem in video games and film- how do artists create non-cookie cutter realistic foliage that doesn't compromise. To me? Natsura is to technical artists what C was to programmers, and personally, I am excited to see it grow.
Lillian Salehi
Environment Artist
i love that we can make all kinds of trees with the tools
Lea Kronenberger
3D Art Lead - Frictional Games
Where creativity meets control — a fresh approach to vegetation assets, built by passionate developers.
Paul Suchan
Environmental Artist
I love Natsura's approach of combining simulation with parametric control - the developers are passionate and it shows in the product.
Jan Klasen
Co-Founder - Realbiomes
The best way to describe Natsura would be to imagine all the possibilities inside Houdini combined with decades of experience in Procedural Vegetation Creation all combined in a single artist friendly toolbox.
Chico Spans
Dead Astronauts - Senior Environment Artist