Not sure who to ask about this, but maybe someone from SideFx would know...

Are the Flora foliage tools shown with Project Pegasus no longer in development? https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/project-pegasus-flora/ [www.sidefx.com]

Looks like something similar is being made by the same people, but as a 3rd party plugin? Project Elderwood/Natsura?
https://vimeo.com/1044719771 [vimeo.com]

Feike Postmes and George Hulm are leading that one too. Is Flora dead then?

Speaking tentatively, as I don't want to speak entirely for them, but as far as I'm aware Flora was the prototype made for Pegasus, which was then developed further into what has become Natsura by Feike and George as a standalone product. It is being demoed as part of Project Elderwood.

Ah alright, I think i got the impression that Flora was a feature or something that would get developed in full, but thats good to know. Thanks!

Hi! I co-developed the Flora prototype while working part-time on a sidefx marketing project. While both I and Feike continue to work with Sidefx on other marketing projects, Natsura is our full-time commitment.

It turns out it's quite tricky to build a speedtree killer, so it's taking some time, but things are looking good and we'll have updates soon.

If you are interested in early-access, feel free to head over to natsura.com

What does the future of Natsura look like now that we got the Procedural Vegetation Editor (PVE) in Unreal Engine 5.7?

GeorgeHulm
Natsura

iamchriswick
What does the future of Natsura look like now that we got the Procedural Vegetation Editor (PVE) in Unreal Engine 5.7?

I'm sorry it took so long to get you a reply here.

Epic built their own botanically inspired model of plant growth, which is awesome.

To answer your question, PVE is free and built into Unreal, and it doesn't change our direction. We see the two as complementary: PVE works inside Unreal, and Natsura sits upstream in Houdini, feeding Unreal with Nanite-ready trees.

Natsura is not tied to a single engine.

Natsura's core is a grammar system, not too different to open L-systems, running in our own engine on APEX. Artists compose a program without ever being asked to think like a programmer, and power users can extend the simulation with custom VEX snippets and even compilable SOP networks that run per step. What you build becomes an easily shareable recipe, a way to embed expertise, data and knowledge.

Natsura is the "shader graph" for branching growth over time. A plant synthesiser.

We're fully committed to this vision, bootstrapped, and thepeople we are accountable to are the folks that are using the tools.

Even in early access, studios at the cutting edge have chosen to adopt Natsura. You can follow where we are heading on our roadmap: https://www.natsura.com/roadmap [www.natsura.com]

Expect to hear a lot more from us 😀