Quick Look: Natsura for Houdini (Patreon)

Natsura, a new tool for creating all types of plants in Houdini, has just been released in early access. They promise impressive results, plus the commercial pricing is very reasonable, including a perpetual option. There’s also a free version for Houdini Apprentice users. Check out their website for more information! https://www.natsura.com

Let’s take a quick look at what Natsura lets 3D artists do.

Creating CG plants is generally a challenging and time-consuming process, but also a crucial one when designing environments for film and games. Houdini doesn’t come with any native plant tools outside of L-systems, and, let’s be real, nobody’s got time for that:

A common solution is to simply purchase asset packs of the vegetation you need, then scatter and instance as required in your 3D app or game engine. This significantly limits the amount of control you have, which is where something like Natsura comes in. Natsura enables end to end creation of all types of plants and vegetation, allowing artists to customize every aspect of plant growth and appearance, including branching, light and gravity influence, texturing, and much more.

The Natsura devs are using Houdini’s relatively new APEX framework as the backbone of their tools. APEX is a very (VERY) technical part of Houdini that few are using at this point, but it does provide exceptional performance which is important with complex modeling tasks.

Natsura provides the most gentle hand-holding installation guide I’ve ever seen, so follow along with that to get the plugin working in Houdini: https://www.natsura.com/docs/getting-started/installation_package Interestingly, Natsura also performs somewhat of a UI overhaul which is honestly quite nice. On some level it makes one wish Houdini would adopt such UI/UX principles natively.

Once you’ve got all the installation files copied and configured, launch Houdini and Natsura provides a welcome screen with some premade projects.

The Simple Tree demo looks great and showcases a fairly elaborate setup, but to start it’s better to look at the Grass and Twiglet examples. I recommend playing around in those simple projects to see what does what. It’s worth noting that, unlike traditional Houdini, Natsura nodes don’t display their current output when their display flag is set. Rather, you need to keep the compiled output node selected to see the final assembly of all Natsura nodes’ contributions.

Select among the various Grow nodes and experiment to see how changing the parameters affects the final output. For example, here in the Twiglet demo I set the grow2 Recursion Max Steps from 3 to 17, causing the leaves to curl more.

While testing I noticed a few (minor) issues, but all in all this is an exciting project. Keep an eye on it as they add new features and polish in the push for a 1.0 release!