Entire Quixel MEGASCAN Now Free for Unreal Engine, Can we get this Please Unity

Quixel just announced that the entire MEGASCAN Library is now free for all Unreal Engine Users, This is seriously Epic, is there any chance Unity can do this?

 

Its free because they have a partnership with epic, which means it definately wont come to unity. Thats not the way partnerships work, you dont partner with 2 competitors, to partner with unity would mean they would have to forfeit their partnership with our major competitor : epic.

 

Can Unity partner with Substance?

 

Blog posts:

• https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-games-and-quixel-join-forces-to-empower-creators
• https://quixel.com/blog/2019/11/12/quixel-joins-forces-with-epic-games

 

Epic Games has acquired a company called Quixel

smart move, otherwise a company like adobe would probably buy them up like they did with substance.

 

Adobe already bought them so it not an option anymore

 

borderline oligopol

 

Think about Adobe what you want, but I would've preferred that. They're not a competitor when it comes to game engines. Epic is... and who knows what the future will hold for Megascans (and the other services), now that Quixel is part of Epic/Unreal.

 

Kind of ironic as 3DO (Quixel's old 3D Viewer) and Mixer were made in Unity.

 

There is some good news for Unity users in there, although the move will inevitably make me concerned about the long term.

From that blog post:

 

Can Adobe and Unity partner?

 

Well its half the price now as it was before, with adobe it would have doubled. If they made it exclusive I would have complained, now I don't see the problem.

 

Mandatory "dat' fortnit' money, holly molly"

 

This is terrible, a missed opportunity for Unity.
Hope they come up with an alternative solution.
I guess many developers who aim for the best graphics will now contemplate switching over to Unreal.

 

Doesn't their main product still require photoshop? Last I heard they were trying to develop some stand alone app but it was in alpha or something and seemed very different than substance painter.

 

Quixel mixer beta doesn't require PS.

 

Quixel Suite hasnt been their main product for a while; if I recall, they were hamstrung by constant changes in the Photoshop API. They mainly focussed on the MegaScans stuff. Quixel Bridge is just a front-end for downloading MegScans. Quixel Mixer is probably their 'main' software product, and though its not as powerful as Substance Alchemist, its in that territory.

 

Do what? Buy a company that Epic already bought? Nope. Buy a company that does what Quixel does? Dont think there currently is one on a simliar scale. Provide their own locked-in high-end library of 3D assets? Maybe. But isurely that comes down to that argument as to whether UT should provide their own solutions for absolutely everything, at the expense of 3rd parties including those in the Asset Store.

Quixel had some nice scanning tech, but its not like another company couldnt start punting out something similar in the way of assets. Maybe this'll open up a window for someone enterprising.

 

Adobe and Unity were partnered several years back.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news..._partnership_gamingfocused_Flash_features.php

That said a partnership doesn't mean free access to a company's products, and this situation involving Epic and Quixel isn't a partnership. Epic bought Quixel.

 

Quixel Mixer is free now, which is cool. Combined with Megascans getting cheaper, seems like a more positive thing overall than the Adobe Allegorithmic acquisition.

 

What happen with unity flash looks like a bitter separation, which everyone position on adobe it seems

 

I never thought this day would come but I'll be trying out Unreal tonight

 

Wow, just imagine how great this is going to look with RTX as well.

 

Absolutely no hopes of this coming to unity. Although, unity members can benefit from it. The subscription plans have been slashed in half, where the aggressive move on epics part would be to scrap the subscription or increase it. There's no comparable service that unity could acquire either (yet).

Or use UE4 and get it free.

 

You can pay for HDRP snaps though ...

 

Nothing new there?

 

Is this where we start discussing how a royalty model might be more useful to users than a subscription model?

 

I think this is a net positive all around for us. Everything Adobe touches turns sour eventually, I don't want them to partner with Unity and I think long term Substance will be turned into some gimmicky bullsh1t addon for Photoshop or something terrible like that. Adobe doesn't have very good decision makers steering product development imho.
Epic on the other hand make games and a game engine. I forsee Quixels toolset quickly becoming more specialized for gamedev applications while the substance toolset might become less specialized. At the very least the 10x increase in developers working for the Quixel team will put some pressure on Allegorithmic if they actually should want to compete, because before this move, nothing was even close. I always liked the people working at Quixel, but my experiences with the old Photoshop plugin versions of their tools were laughably bad and I felt like this commitment to Photoshop is the major factor holding them back. I'm hopeful this will get back on track to becomming a usable tool down the line.

 

There is no discussion to be made, subscriptions for software is a terrible model.

 

Just like Unity, Epic dont market their engine as being just for games these days. There is a lot of overlap in so many ways, I dont think its a question of tools becoming more game specialised or not. Optimisations, tools and future decisions about what content to make may very well be affected by the new ownership, but it wont just be games that benefit.

 

That's fine, archviz etc. is still close enough. I fear that Adobe would approach such a tool as "how can we port this to iOS and turn it into a one-button app with a subscription fee". Like e.g. photoscan objects with the ipad camera, and then retexture them in "iSubstancePainter" and drag and drop them into your iOS Photoshop to compose them into your instagram selfies...
I have nothing but disdain left for Adobe, in case it wasn't obvious enough yet.

 

Disney and some movie studios use Unreal in preproduction pipeline.

 

I think the average hobbyist/tiny indie doesn't need to think much about using megascans assets anyway. If you got photoreal tree stumps and cliffs, you kinda also need photoreal lighting, characters, animations, etc etc.

20 million dollars later...

I see this as a bonus to unreal users, but doesn't seem like gains any ground on unity territory. At least not my reasons for one engine over another.

 

20 million? Any decent artist can get a high end character out in a couple weeks or less. once you have one body modeled, textured, and rigged you can just replace the head and transfer the animations over to create multiple characters on a budget.

 

Oh? Ok nevermind it's easy.

 

I don't often use megascans for unreal engine but when I do

Spoiler

It's AAA

 

Let's not forget that Quixel also cut Megascan subscription costs for everyone. So there's that.

 

That's what I was thinking too. I was going to make some sarcastic post about how this whole situation doesn't affect me because I'm not making a AAA sticks-and-rocks simulator.

 

Well. There goes a year of hard, hard work and investment. This morning I got up at 5:30 to start working on the last object in my massive desert formation photogrammetry rock and cliff pack. I was rather excited to be nearly finished. Then I read that I'm out of business. I can't compete with free. It was always going to be tough making ends meet, but I think 90% of my customers just vanished. Finishing this last item ... Its suddenly hard and tedious.

 

Only if 90% of your customers were on Unreal.

 

Man, that really sucks! My condolences!

If your stuff is up to their standards, just contact them and ask them if they want to do a total buyout for whatever you'd like to have as a sallery for that year that you invested.

 

I think you jump to conclusions. Unity customer still need it, and last I checked megascans mostly only had forest biome assets.

 

I definitely agree that they don't have much in the way of desert assets. Below are links to their two desert-themed collections. One is for handling buildings while the other is a very red desert. I feel like a much more generic desert collection would be competitive.

https://quixel.com/megascans/library/collections/nature/sandstone
https://quixel.com/megascans/library/collections/nature/D_Warzone

 

Absolutely. I much prefer substance source, since then I can (usually) pick and choose the level of detail I want, and modify things to fit the style of the game. Procedural textures are especially good at blending in. Photoscanned assets are not good team players.

Also, if a few pretty free textures makes someone switch to a different engine, I can't imagine what the rest of the production cycle looks like. The most minor strengths and weaknesses of UE are going to eclipse the impact that will have on your game.

 

Particularly since you can still get those textures anyway. The difference is just whether or not you have to buy their subscription to access them.

It's a reasonable consideration for hobby / low budget development. As soon as your team is getting paid... well, US$20/mo is a no brainer if you're going to use the stuff. It's in the vicinity of one hour of a person's time.

 

On top of that, I'd still pay $20 a month if it meant I didn't have to learn the ins and outs of a whole other engine.

 

It's good that epic took advantage of the opportunity while making it cheaper for everyone, that's a classy move.

 

This is insane. I am now switching one of my projects to Unreal.

 

You guys know that the assets can work in either engine right?

You need to convert the normal map and maybe change the way textures are packed, but that's it.

 

If you're developing games for giggles it doesn't matter if you choose your engine based off of the free toys you receive.

That said it is worth pointing out that there is a limit to how many assets you can download per month. Making it free for UE4 developers means you're no longer constrained by that limit.

And now I'm suddenly wondering if you could use a UE4-based account to download all the assets for your paid account.