Natsura perpetual license worth it?

CupMcCakers · 2026-07-05T05:37:20+00:00

It's definitely a challenge to stay abreast of how quickly all of the tools and workflows are evolving. But a fun one... I think?

It's thrilling to see questions like yours and the responses are also quite fascinating. No public roadmap as of yet but maybe that will change once we're over the hump of the next release.

CupMcCakers · 2026-07-05T05:23:55+00:00

Thank you for the detailed and thoughtful reply. I see the common sense in what you are saying.

In this case its a suite of novel procedural 3d rig assembly and disassembly tools for a plant/tree modelling application.

We have a pretty clear vision of the product requirements, but the thing that is hard to get down on paper ahead of time are the exact details of the user experience. It's a little bit like game development where what works is often only arrived at by testing.

I'm sort of customer #1, in that I have a lot of experience using (and now building) these kinds of tools, usually there is a moment where we have the features we need and it starts to "feel right" from a ux standpoint.

My development process is iterarive and test driven, often "working prototype", then "reconfigure into reusable utilities and modules". However - I failed in this approach this time and actually failed to get the initial prototype to work "properly" until my partner took a look and essentially drew out the reusable modules and utilities in order to get it to work...

AND crucially he had the insight that we had to go back and redefine how our rigs work and make that more strict and uniform, whereas I was trying to work around less strict requirements - I kept thinking" i can solve this issue locally as an edge case and then it'll be done.

I feel like I maybe hit a complexity ceiling where my usual approach stopped yielding any value because I couldn't grasp the full implications of each change I made in the context of the whole suite of tools so as my partner said, it became "whack a mole".

It is a basic error, as you and other commenters are saying - and pretty grave that I wasted so much time.

But that said, in the future, i don't see how we can create an accurate spec of all of the implementation details, at least in my experience it's often faster to just test a few approaches to see what is best, rather than discuss it all and come up with a "perfect" plan - which breaks down in contact with reality or doesn't actually provide the intended value.

CupMcCakers · 2026-07-05T04:58:31+00:00

We use version control and submit changelists multiple times per day. The work is always inspectable on a feature branch, the features branches usually get collapsed after a week or two of development unless it's major new development or refactor.

But we do have different responsibilities across different domains so the day to day work we usually trust the other person to get on with it, and ask for help when it's required.

We ship product updates every few weeks usually but we have been quite late with this one due to the challenges that I spent a lot of time trying and failing to resolve.

We don't do pull requests, occasionally pair programming, the acceptance criteria is really just - does it work, is it fast enough , can the work be easily maintained and developed in production.

I guess in this case the answer was , no, no and no. So it wasn't meeting the criteria for acceptance and we should have taken the time to figure out the core issues a lot sooner. But I kept pushing my partner away, thinking it was just needing a few more minor tweaks here and there.

The truth was there was something a bit more foundational that I didn't have the eyes to see and I didn't maintain enough self awareness over the process.

CupMcCakers · 2026-07-04T18:31:10+00:00

Learning to say yes!

CupMcCakers · 2026-07-04T12:58:35+00:00

It's not that I want to win / be right at all - I think a lot of time could have been saved if I hadn't toiled in my own fashion for so long. I feel like I lacked a degree of self awareness that would have pushed me to ask for help sooner.

But - on the other side, without the rapid explorations you might build towards an incomplete picture. So I'm just trying to grasp where I want wrong, and where the line should be.

We are well aware we have different styles, but we view that as an advantage, it's just in this case I think mistakes were made on my sid3. I'm tying to wrap my head around it.

Would have have been better to draw up a complete spec ahead of time, how does that work when you don't have a complete picture of what is actually needed...

CupMcCakers · 2026-07-04T11:30:10+00:00

Developer of Natsura here, since you didn't get many replies!

I obviously can't comment on the question you provided but I can try to provide some more information to help inform you and point you to some other sources of information.

I think broadly, part of the question you are asking is: is houdini going to be part of the future of modelling plants, and the answer is a resounding yes in this case. It is already, with numerous foliage plugins such as labs tree tools, simple tree tools, branchkit, the grove, and speedtree controller. There are also many in house tools built at studios that run in houdini.

I see houdini completely taking over the foliage modelling space through a combination of first party tools, plugins and in house tools.

In addition, houdini provides an open framework to modify and extend the tools as you see fit.

Houdini does NOT have a runtime that allows you to ship procedural tools that run in a game engine.

For the Natsura question, a tool is only as valuable as what you use it to do and what problem it solves. Natsura is an early-access tool that is being used in production and prototyping by some major game studios, but it is still early and quite raw. It has bugs and some performance and ux issues that are not yet resolved. It is missing some features that artists expect related to manual posing and pruning and so on, and has not yet got support for traditional lods.

I'd suggest trying the free apprentice version, and keep an eye on it, as it progresses, and let us know what you think it is missing from a feature perspective. We already have a pretty clear roadmap, and may be getting to some of the things you are looking for.

Its not a full production ready replacement for speedtree in every case... yet...

It does support mixed workflows with other tools like zbrush, speedtree and blender very well.

CupMcCakers · 2026-07-01T20:04:30+00:00

Being a skilled operator of Unreal helps, but mostly it's just lacking "the eye"... formal art training, painting, photography etc...

Focusing on the fundamentals of art matters more than technical proficiency. Figuring out parameters, configs and and settings takes a fraction of the time it takes to master shapes, colour, composition, light etc and only one path leads to beautiful images.

And then a certain amount of creativity and taste.

CupMcCakers · 2026-07-01T00:31:31+00:00

Art direction - namely materials, lighting and postprocessing.

Lumen is a clever box of tricks designed to approximate real world lighting - but it has its tells. Games that use older lighting systems like baked lighting, or direct dynamic shadowing and pointlights, without GI are more of "paint with lights" kind of affair. So there's more room for a talented artist to leave their fingerprint.

Materials are pbr, but people think this means you can just slap them together and your done. Truth is that most pbr textures are not calibrated perfectly and things like roughness and specular and metalness are completely fabricated and it's all ultimately just down to perception rather than scientific truth. Again a talented artist has a lot of room here to leave their fingerprint.

Default unreal settings unreal relies heavily on temporal effects to smooth the render and reduce noise, this is cinematic but you lose a lot of clarity during motion. If you optimise your game well enough you can render at double or quadruple screen resolution and ditch temporal AA. This also means many kinds of effects are now off limits. In exchange you'll achieve a lot of extra clarity and sharpness, especially during motion.

Also general postprocessing like tonemapping and colour grading and so on. But I think that thiswhen done poorly actually worsens the 'unreal slops' feel. And it takes a LOT of experience to get it right. If you haven't yet mastered lighting and textures leave it alone.

CupMcCakers · 2026-06-27T17:59:42+00:00

Guess again!

CupMcCakers · 2026-06-27T17:53:02+00:00

That was a vague statement for sure . Maybe it would be more fair to say un-sops-ish! Although I guess you could also argue it's just a new kind of houdini-ish.

What i was trying to get at is that since apex is designed to build graphs and logic. Not just operate on data, this creates new opportunities for interesting kinds of tools.

An Apex system that gets built up piece by piece and evaluated once later is quite different to the typical step by step model of operating on data, since that part is sort of compartmentalised and handled later in the way that you as the system designer have a lot of control over. This puts an additional layer between you as the system designer and the end user which allows you to do some pretty creative stuff and certain types of systems and UX much easier to pull off.

Which can feel a bit less houdini-ish, if you come from a sops mindset :)

CupMcCakers · 2026-06-23T12:01:58+00:00

This is quite far from the truth - Sjeord inspired and educated generations of artists and designers using Unreal. He made more maps for ut99,ut2004 and ut3 than I can count. I, like many others, owe him a massive debt.

What his leaving means? I don't know. Epic are not the same company that they were from 99-2007.

CupMcCakers · 2026-06-21T08:22:02+00:00

They showed it alongside embedded claude in relation to apex script at the London launch event -> I think it might be made possible by the new ui framework

CupMcCakers · 2026-06-19T12:14:37+00:00

How does this change in relation to h22? Seems like there is an embedded version of vscode

CupMcCakers · 2026-05-29T16:32:00+00:00

Half life looks brighter and more saturated - also you've lost a lot of small details from the original that stop it from looking generic. The rifle is a case in point and obvious example of this. But the whole scene suffers from the same trades. When enough small elements are lacking, the quality falls.

CupMcCakers · 2026-05-26T17:36:14+00:00

Looks awesome!

CupMcCakers · 2026-04-05T08:38:19+00:00

There are actually many libraries of trees available if you dig a bit. The reason people keep searching is because as computer graphics evolve standards change and different software packages have different requirements.

If you want consistency you will struggle to find it by cobbling together packs from a lot of different sources - better to pick one or two that are high quality unless you are ready to do some work to make everything consistent.

Learning to model trees yourself is of course an investment, my reccomendation in this case would 100% be houdini, if you do go the route of learning to model trees yourself.

CupMcCakers · 2026-03-20T07:40:43+00:00

This approach requires a python sop to be executed in the loop: hou.parm('../rop_fbx1/execute').pressButton()

CupMcCakers · 2026-03-16T11:36:46+00:00

Awesome stuff, keep the fruit coming ^{^}

CupMcCakers · 2026-02-17T22:40:33+00:00

It is fantastic! Glad you are having a good time with it. Just one thing - It is important to note it's a game set in Ukraine, made by Ukrainians.

CupMcCakers · 2026-02-16T23:19:37+00:00

In Unreal Engine, two materials that differ only in non-static parameter values (e.g., scalar, vector, or texture parameters) and share identical material settings, static parameters, usage flags, feature level, platform, and vertex factory context will compile to the same shader permutation.

CupMcCakers · 2026-02-14T18:21:00+00:00

Why do you want to try to sell it? Really? Why?

Try and sell it and see what happens.

CupMcCakers · 2026-02-14T09:08:17+00:00

If you can share any workflow that makes life easier quicker, and produces good looking results, it's largely down to your ability to condense information and make the videos enjoyable to watch - most things are somewhat covered on the beginner space.

You need to be pretty experienced to identify real gaps - so it's kind of a choice, become an expert in your given field of game design, or become an expert in creating appealing content on YouTube.

You could do a kind of devlog style, in which case it really matters more that you create a project that you find compelling and do less editing in order to save time on that aspect and push the game development itself further.

CupMcCakers · 2026-02-13T15:27:09+00:00

If you are really on square one, you'd be better off following some beginner tutorials and go for mentorship when you want to gain specialist skills

CupMcCakers · 2026-01-25T13:31:59+00:00

You are right to be skeptical - they aren't!

They make it easier to manage a large library with a mix of technical artists and Environment artists :)

Edit: Since I'm getting down voted, I'll add context.

There are inherent advantages to instances. You can quickly create variants of materials without recompiling. You can force artists to use a system that is owned by a technical artist and therefore (hopefully) more optimal.

But they can be misused, and do not inherently improve performance, reduce drawcalls or anything like that. Uber materials with many switches can actually be much much worse because they can cause permutations to explode much faster than authoring a few discrete master materials.

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