Natron
Natron is free, open-source, cross-platform nodal and composing software used by studios, artists, developers and scientists to create visual effects. Some of Natron applications and features include OpenColorIO library for colorspace management, multiple file formats including EXR, JPG, PNG, DPX,TIFF and more, multi-tasking, inbuilt bug recovery, support to many open-source OpenFX plugins and commercial OpenFX plugins, fast & interactive viewer, intuitive user interface, real-time feedback, and many more.
Top Natron Alternatives
- Blender
- Smoke
- Sapphire
- Nuke
- Fusion
- Filmora
- Flame
- After Effects
- ZBrush
- HitFilm
- Media Composer
- Realflow
- Houdini FX
- particleIllusion
- Red Giant Effects Suite
Top Natron Alternatives and Overview
Blender
Blender is a free, open-source 3D software and VFX application, created, used and managed by thousands of VFX experts, artists, professionals, students, animators, scientists, game artists, and more people around the world.
Smoke
Smoke is a powerful video effects management tool for Mac platform used for creating 3D visual effects.
Sapphire
Sapphire is a visual effects suite used in various industries including broadcasting, films and advertising.
Nuke
Nuke is a powerful node-based editorial, finishing and VFX tool designed to deliver interactive visual effects, animation, 3D, paints and motion graphics.
Fusion
Fusion by Backmagic Design is visual effects (VFX) and motion graphics compositing software used by visual effects artists, motion graphic designers, broadcast media and 3D animators to create and edit interactive VFX applications.
Filmora
Filmora video editor is used to create powerful videos with a modern and intuitive user interface featured with several designing & editing tools.
Flame
The software package includes the latest released software, maintenance subscription, software updates, flexible licensing, extensions...
After Effects
The software lets users create any high to supreme quality graphics and looks on a...
ZBrush
ZBrush’s powerful yet intuitive interface is equipped with several advanced sculpting and designing tools, making...
HitFilm
HitFilm editor is featured with several advanced tools including integrated 3D compositing, intuitive trimmer and...
Media Composer
The software is suitable for many industries including, television, film making, broadcasting, and live streaming...
Realflow
RealFlow is suitable for large-scale simulations including floods or oceans, medium-large scale simulations with smoothed-particle...
Houdini FX
It features a very interactive and easy-to-use interface that allows fast and flexible content creation...
particleIllusion
particleIllusion allows easy and fast creation of visual fx and motion graphics with its wide...
Red Giant Effects Suite
It is bundled with several visual effects and motion graphics tools to help users with...
Natron Review and Overview
Digital composting is one of the conventional parts of current image editing saga. Due to this, many digital composters are being introduced in the market very often.
Among many such paid platforms for digital composting, a free open source program named Natron is one of the many choices for free Digital Composting. It gets this name from Lake Natron, Tanzania, that gives natural visual effects by calcifying dead animals.
It was formed by Alexandre Gauthier and Frederic Devernay and sponsored by Inria (French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation). With time, the product got too much popularity and a vast userbase.
After its initial release in October 2014, it could execute 100+ graphs. It got recognition from top universities like Paris 8 University, along with other open-source computer graphics tools.
How Natron differs from Paid and other Free Digital Composters?
Unlike many other paid sources of digital composting, Natron had the pressure to perform vehemently. Even with merely two core developers, Natron included one of the best user interfaces along with many useful features.
Natron comes with features like rotoscoping, trackers, GPU & network rendering, curve & dope-sheet editor, and an in-depth keying tool.
It was developed mainly using Python and C++ languages. The part of the codes developed is still owned by Inria. However, the program got halted due to some unknown issues among the teams.
Regardless, Natron comes with a decent render engine. There are some persistence issues with Natron like memory allocation, internal engine logic, etc.
Natron offers advanced editing modes and tools like stereoscopic 3D, Bezier Curves, parameter animations, etc. It even supports plugins like Shader Toy, G’MIC offline, and many other public plugins.
It offers a real-time playback and a multi-view UI. The most decent job by Natron developers was giving such an exhaustive interface cost-free, almost comparable to top programs like Blender and Krita.
Conclusion
Although the program was working very well, it finally slowed down with the last release in August 2019. It is only hoped that Inria and the core developers try something to revive this program as one of the top open-source computer graphics programs.
Company Information
Company Name: Natron
Company Address: Grenoble, France
Founded in: 2014
Top Features
- 32-bit Floating Point
- Linear Color Processing
- Colorspace Management
- Multiple Supported Formats
- OpenFX Plugins Supported
- Intuitive User Interface
- Real-Time Feedback
- Multi-threaded Rendering Pipeline
- Proxy Rendering Supported
- Multiple Graphs
- Network Rendering
- Command-line Tool
- Fast & Interactive Viewer
- Accurate Zooming & Panning
- Real-time Playbacks
- Motion Editing
- Intuitive Curve Editor
- Multi-view Workflow
- Editing Masks & Animates
- Rotoscoping & Rotopainting
- Tracker Node
- Nodes Presets
- Python Scripting
- Multiple Plane
- Nodegraph Enhancement
- Blender’s Tracker Integration
- Read & Write Meta-nodes
- Optical Flow Nodes
- Natural Matting
- Deep Data Supported
- 3D Workspace