Minor·
Natsura 0.7.1.0
Highly experimental release containing many untested features and significant under-the-hood changes to the decorations pipeline
Back to ChangelogHighlights
- This is an experimental build. Much of it is untested and some nodes ship as placeholders for work that isn't finished. Keep your 0.7.0.x install alongside it.
- Effectors are rolled out across the decorations. Surface Decoration and Assembly Decoration now host their own effector stacks, the same way Grow does. Each effector carries a weight that can be a value or a map.
- Simulate has a post-process stage. Substeps with mappable segments, interpolation and enhancement, plus their own effector stack, all behind an Enable Postprocess toggle.
- Multi-tree export. One wind sidecar per tree instead of a single merged file, and USD written out as organised layers — prototypes, per-tree assemblies and a root stub — instead of one flat file.
- Material bindings now survive on instanced prototypes. Previously only the trunk arrived bound; every prototype came through empty.
- Houdini 22 support. Natsura previously failed to start on H22 entirely — no desktop, no logging, no background service, and no error to say why.
- Surface Decoration gained real shaping — strand resampling, spiral, mappable width min/max/scale and smoothing, displacement, end caps and UV scaling.
Workflow Changes
- Effector stacks appear on more nodes than before. If you know how they work on Grow, they work the same way on Surface Decoration, Assembly Decoration and the new Shape node.
- Simulate has a new Postprocess tab. It is off by default — turn on Enable Postprocess to reach it.
- USD exports now produce a folder structure rather than a single file: shared prototypes in
parts/, one assembly layer per tree inassemblies/, and a small root layer that stitches them together. - New package layout. The root of the download holds only what you click, read or edit; the machinery lives in
setup/. Setup creates a real shortcut for your platform —.lnkon Windows, an.appbundle on macOS, a.desktopentry on Linux. launch.confis plainKEY=VALUE, with every key documented inREADME.txt.New Nodes
- Some of these are placeholders for features still in progress. They are in the build so the pipeline around them can be tested, not because they are ready to use. Where that is the case it is called out below.
- Natsura Bud — Placeholder — not ready for use. The interface is there (spawn interval, whorl, multiplicity, offset, phyllotaxy) but the node is incomplete. It is coming in a later release.
- Natsura Cluster — A new utility node for performing attribute based clustering between two datasets.
- Natsura Invoke Effector — Runs a stack of effector snippets against a group. This is the machinery behind the effector rollout; precompiled by default.
- Natsura Map Wrangle — A bare VEX field for writing a map directly.
- Natsura Rebuild — Rebuild is a new utility that allows the tree skeleton to be rebuilt with new primitives according to a segmentation attribute. A simple, fast, but powerful new utility that is key to various meshing operations.
- Natsura Resample — Natsura resample is a powerful and fast resample that offers more shaping options along with support for the natsura mapping and effectors frameworks.
- Natsura Shape — Hosts a stack of shape effectors, each weighted by a value or a map, with an Allow Breaks toggle.
- Natsura Strand — Natsura "strand" is a new core utility for dealing with skeletons that allows the tree to be segmented. This is about the 5th time this has been implemented and it will likely be re-implemented many more times to come. The goal is sensible segmentation by default, with room for customisation and support for the mapping framework in future.
- STRANDS — Placeholder — not ready for use. Expect it to change or disappear.
- Natsura Sweep — Natsura Sweep is an extremely powerful and fast new core utility for building geometry in natsura, which replaces the native houdini sweep and offers more, better, procedural control. In addition, importantly, it supports progressive density. In the future it will support many advanced sweep behaviours which we cannot wait to share.
Node Updates
- Natsura Assembly Decoration — Hosts an effector stack.
- Natsura Export Json — Also updated as part of this work: Grow, Core Grow, Core Decorate, Clusters Decoration, Rebuild Primitive Attributes, Spline Reduce, Atlas Material, Execute Logic, Instancify, Rig to Assembly, Identify Shared Instances, Import Speedtree, Export Unreal Nanite Assembly.
- Natsura Export Json — Effector and mapping nodes updated alongside the rollout: Autocode Effector, Effector Template, Deflection Effector, Magnet Effector, Noise Effector, Map, Map Attribute, Map Constant, Mapping Template, Core Wrangle.
- Natsura Export Json — Writes one file per tree, named
<asset>_<n>_wind.json. - Natsura Simulate — New Postprocess stage — substeps with mappable Segments, Interpolate and Enhance, a Substep Effectors stack, and a Postprocess Stack.
- SOP Create Nanite Assembly — Material targeting is pattern-based rather than a frozen list of paths, so it survives renaming the asset, changing the tree count and changing the prototype count. The list refreshes itself immediately before every export.
- Natsura Surface Decoration — Added displacement scaling, end cap types, U and V scale, and quality controls for curve simplification, surface subdivision and decimation.
- Natsura Surface Decoration — New Strands section: resample with mappable interpolation, subdivision and step length, plus Spiral.
- Natsura Surface Decoration — New Surface Effectors stack on the surface mesh.
- Natsura Surface Decoration — Width is now fully mappable — smooth width, min, max and scale, with a minimum-width limit.
- Natsura Unreal Wind — Wind is compiled per tree rather than across the whole geometry. Each connected tree gets its own payload; compiler version is now 2.0.
Performance
- Selection in a 1,008-node scene: ~3.8s to ~0.6s per click.
- Spans panel scope rebuild, single simulate: 179ms to 4.4ms.
- Spans panel scope rebuild, 26 simulates and 619 drivers: 1,697ms to 10.5ms.
- Spans panel background poll: 406ms to 121ms.
- Node graph colouring on repeat calls: full rewrite to no writes at all.
Bug Fixes
- Natsura Export Json — An empty Name now raises an error instead of writing a mysteriously named file.
- Natsura Export Json — Booleans were written as
1and0instead oftrueandfalse. - Natsura Export Json — Duplicate
Rootandrootjoints both survived into the sidecar. - SOP Create Nanite Assembly — Materials did not come through on instanced prototypes. 36 of 38 bindings were being dropped at the reference boundary; only the trunks survived.
- SOP Create Nanite Assembly — The material list went empty or stale after a rename or a change in tree count, and nothing refilled it.
- Natsura Unreal Wind — Linux and macOS install failed —
setup.shshipped with Windows line endings. - Natsura Unreal Wind — Multi-tree exports wrote a single merged sidecar covering every tree in the scene.
- Natsura Unreal Wind — Natsura did not start at all under Houdini 22, silently. H22 uses Python 3.13 and only 3.10 and 3.11 were shipped.
- Natsura Unreal Wind — Starting Houdini with an empty scene could spawn a Natsura geo node with Grow and Simulate in it.
- Natsura Unreal Wind — Windows install failed —
setup.batcalled asetup.ps1that was not in the archive. Internals
- The startup sequence lives in one place now, with the per-Python-version entry points reduced to shims. Supporting a new Houdini version is a file copy rather than a third copy of the logic to keep in sync.
- Hotkeys persist nothing. The dead file-based loader and its shipped config file have been removed; bindings resolve live on each keypress.
- Includes everything from 0.7.0.3. If you never successfully installed that one, its fixes are here.
Known Issues
- Experimental build. The decoration pipeline changes are largely untested and regressions are likely.
- Bud and prestitch_temp are placeholders. They will appear in the tab menu but should not be used in real work.
- SOP Create Nanite Assembly — If an existing hip has Allow Editing of Contents on the node, use Match Current Definition after updating or the material fix will not reach it.
- SOP Create Nanite Assembly — Material bindings are written into the root layer, not into the per-tree
assemblies/*.usda. If you load an assembly layer standalone it will have no bindings. - Natsura Unreal Wind — Gust attenuation, root stub, ground cover and emit mode are internal and not reachable from the node interface.
- Natsura Unreal Wind — The macOS
.appbundle is untested and carries a generic icon. - Natsura Unreal Wind — USD exports write
upAxis = "Y". Unreal is Z-up. Looking Ahead
- Settling the effector rollout and the Simulate post-process stage, and finishing the growth components that Bud is standing in for.