What is Natural Scene Designer 1.0?

Natural Scene Designer is a landscape design and renderer application for 90's Macs.  Ray tracing is super slow, but it does not require any 3D acceleration card at all.  It runs all in software mode.

Download links were removed as asked by the software author.  Please visit https://www.naturalgfx.com/ and support the author by purchasing his software.

See also: Bryce 2

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As soon as MetaTools’ Bryce popped on the scene, hundreds of fantastical 3D worlds appeared, as if by Power Mac-induced magic. Now Natural Graphics, creator of Scenery Animator, has released Natural Scene Designer, with an emphasis on Natural. Sure, you could make islands floating in the sky, but isn’t it more interesting to make Lake Tahoe?

Natural Scene Designer’s interface is more down to earth than Bryce’s. The toolbars are reminiscent of those in full-blown 3D programs, with buttons for repositioning the camera and scene, adjusting the camera’s focal depth, and more. The interface is straightforward and fairly easy to follow, even for those of us who never mastered the ability to rotate 3D items in our heads. You work mainly within the Map window, which gives you a sort of topographic map of your landscape; the Camera View window gives you a low-resolution idea of the scene. You can adjust the camera’s bank and pitch as well as height and position. The view updates in near real time, at least on a Power Mac 7600/120.

You can either create a fractal landscape in NSD or you can open one of the landscapes included on the CD, created with Digital Elevation Models from the U.S. Geological Survey (the entire United States is available in low-resolution format at in the Products and Services section).

When you’ve settled on a camera view, it’s time to render. NSD offers the option of a Quick Test, which gives you a good idea of what’s what but doesn’t include previews of objects or clouds, or a full ray-traced rendering. NSD is quick, as rendering goes — a 640-x-480-pixel image, landscape only, came out in about two minutes. If you add items, such as clouds or trees (NSD comes with models of four types of trees, which you can mix in density and fullness of leaf, and for which you can define altitude ranges), the time to render can more than double. NSD comes with a few primitive shapes, such as spheres and cones, but doesn’t offer Boolean operations, so you can make an ice-cream cone but not a Pac Man shape.

However, NSD sports some very cool features that Bryce 2 doesn’t. The animation abilities are terrific: Through key frames, you can move the camera or objects (or even clouds) along smooth or straight paths, with autobanking (great for those spaceship chase scenes), time control, and anti-aliasing. You can save animations as QuickTime movies, and you can import any 3DMF object, map a PICT image onto it, or export your landscape as a 3DMF object.

Speaking of 3D: With NSD you can create a QuickTime VR panorama of your scene (this requires the free tool Make QTVR Panorama, available at ). Rendering time is longer, but the result is a 360-degree view of your scene, whether it’s your favorite valley or the Marineras Trench (that’s on Mars, son).

Best of all, NSD is easy enough to use that you don’t have to be Raf Anzovin to put together a good-looking scene. With only a skim of the manual, we modeled a prehistoric Brisbane in 10 minutes and put together a first-person fly-through on Mars in less than an hour. Armed with a good pile of 3DMF models, you could remake the world.

Turner, D. D. (June 1997). Natural Scene Designer. MacAddict. (pg. 69).

Download Natural Scene Designer 1.0 for Mac

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Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.5 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: 68K + PPC (FAT)

At least 8MB of RAM (recommended 16MB or more, depending on your project's size)

Mac OS 7.5 - Mac OS 9.2.2

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver