natFX® is a plug-in of 3ds max® designed for 3D Animation, Video Game willing to reduce production costs, rendering time or optimize realtime performances. natFX provides new first class technologies as such as: animation, realtime modeling, level of details, normal maps, texture management ...

Key Features:

Simulate growth

With the built-in plant growth simulator, you can age any plant or tree. Start off with a sapling and simply change its age and natFX automatically regenerates it. Age a coconut tree to 350 years ! You can also reverse ageing by reducing the age of your generated tree.

Change Seasons

What about their seasonal states ? Will the majority of your plants flower in spring? Find out using natFX’s powerful tuning functions. Real modifications using botanic parameters actually change the structure of your plants and trees. Click Apply and natFX will do the rest.

Infinite number of variations for each plant

Thanks to its unique procedural plant modeling technology, natFX provides an infinite number of variations for each plant. Simply click "New" to generate a different shape of the tree you selected from the library and natFX will simulate immediatly a new natural shape with the same age and season...like in the real world! A key feature to imporve realism in your scenes.

Low Poly 3D or Realtime 3D settings

natFX offers a full flexibility and a wide range of modeling option in order to optimize the number of polygons.
- The Full 3D mode provides a 3D high resolution model for close shoot and high quality results. Generates from 5000 to 1 million polygons.
- The Volumic 3D mode combines the richness of a full 3D modeling for trunk and main branches associated with impostors facing the camera for the foliage. This technique associates realism of the tree with medium poly count and low texture count. It privileges the density of the foliage while respecting the architecture of the branches. Generates from 500 to 10000 polygons.
- The Hybrid mode provides a 3D low polygonal model (combining 2D for the small branches and the leaves and 3D for the trunk and the main branches) needed for realtime environments or for large landscape scenes to optimize rendering time. Generates from 50 to 2000 polygons.
- The 2D Billboard mode generates simple texture maps to populate back ground or a last Level Of Detail in a realtime scene. From 1 to 6 polygons.

Choose how many polygons you want!

Giving you the control over every element of a generated model is important in optimizing it for your own use. This is why the Fine Tuning panel in the Modify Panel gives you the functions to change the details. With natFX it is possible to select a 3D branch and convert it to 2D (and vice versa) but also to totally prune your tree as you want it by deleting any of its branches

Integrated Wind Animation System

natFX has an embedded wind animation system that allows the artist to generate a wind animated tree from a fixed natFX tree within 1 minute maximum: select the orientation and the speed of the wind and validate. The animation is generated and can be tuned in real-time while it is playing into 3ds Max.

Sculpt Trunk & add roots

The Sculpt Trunk features allow the control of the roughness of the trunk. This feature is very useful to create natural roots at the bottom of the trunk to give a nice connection with the ground. The user has access to a library of various "displacement maps" samples which could be applied to the trunk of any plants. Users can also create their own "displacement maps" to create special effects on the trunk such as nodes, cracks, bumps or any kind of deformation.

Handling of Normal Mapping

Thanks to the integration of Normal Mapping, you can give relief to any leaf or bark texture of your models while keeping the same number of polygons.

Multiple LOD tuning

Being able to quickly and easily control the level of detail of every 3D model is crucial. 3D LODs help you optimize your scene and speeds rendering. This is why natFX’s LOD Tuning enables you to predetermine the degree of quality you need in your scene.Set background trees and plants to a low LOD and foreground to high. Plus, the Statistics Panel in the LOD Tuning shows you how many polygons there are in your tree and its texture size.

Prune your tree !

Once you have generated your tree, you sometimes wish to cutomize a part of your model for the tree to fit to your landscape. natFX allows you to prune in a couple of clicks a branch or a full hierarchy of branches of your model