[MUSIC PLAYING] >>Galen: Hey,
welcome, everybody. Thanks so much for
joining our webinar today. I'm Galen from Quixel here. I'm an Evangelist
here at the company. >>Teddy: And
hi, I'm Teddy Bergsman. I'm Director of Quixel at Epic. >>Galen: Today,
we're going to be covering a couple different
things for you guys. We're going to start in
the early days of Quixel, go over some of the history. We're going to cover all
of our current offerings today and then give
you guys a little bit of a glimpse into
some of the things that are happening
in the future. So Teddy, why don't we
start with a little bit of an introduction
for each of us? So why don't you
go ahead and start? >>Teddy: Sure. So my background
is in 3D graphics and system engineering. I worked in the
AAA games industry for five years developing 3D
scanning hardware and texture automation software
before starting Quixel almost 10 years ago now
together with Waqar Azim. And today at Epic as
director of Quixel, I am responsible for the
success and vision and goals for our scanning missions. >>Galen: And then
I've worked personally as an environment artist in the
games industry, a senior art lead, and worked on a
couple different games, like BioShock, Borderlands,
Evolve, some Star Wars games, and the most
recent, God of War. And as an evangelist
at the company, primarily my job is to obviously
evangelize the product, speak to all of our
existing clients, and also speak with teams that
might be looking to potentially leverage Megascans
technology across all the different verticals
that we work inside. So Teddy, why don't you tell us
a little bit about the history of the company? >>Teddy: Sure. So around 10 years
ago, Waqar and I, we left the games
industry to build what we wanted to become the
world's largest scan library, and that was to help
artists get access to very high-quality content
that typically was only available to really
large studios within the games
and film industry. And to build that
content library, we figured that scanning
would be the way to go to produce the
highest quality, most photorealistic content. But seeing as there were no
off-the-shelf scanners back then, we decided
to build our own. Now, building
scanners is something that I've been passionate
about since I was a kid essentially, and I built scanners
all through my teens. And Waqar was also a big,
big mechatronic nerd. And luckily we found each
other, and together we built the first
hardware prototype that came to lay the foundation
for the Megascans library. Now, the first prototype
was a big, scary box, and it got us into
a lot of trouble. We were held at
gunpoint at one time. And overall, it was just a
very intimidating device. But over the years,
this technology has significantly
been streamlined. With every new
trip, we bring back feedback to our hardware
teams, and the hardware is becoming smaller, more
portable, lightweight, easier to operate. And today it's a
handheld device. And we built these
scanners simply so that we can
create the highest quality content possible. But building these prototypes
and scanners and teams to scan all over the world is
not an inexpensive endeavor, and so we had to fund
that entire operation. And to do so, I wrote a
number of tools for artists to help streamline
the texturing process. So one of those
tools was NDO, which allowed you to create normal
maps straight in Photoshop-- for instance,
taking a photograph and turning it
into a 3D material or using selections and brushes
and vectors inside of Photoshop to convert them to
normals in real-time. And this was generally
a much faster workflow than modeling something
by hand in a 3D software just to bake down a 2D map. Here you would actually
be in 2D the entire time. You would have real-time
control over your results. Now, we were very lucky
to see a small community form around this
tool, and it helped us create even more art
tools, one of them being DDO, and together we called this
suite of tools the Quixel Suite, and it was focused
on just automating and streamlining the texturing
workflow for artists straight in Photoshop-- so for instance, introducing
the Smart Material, which allowed you to
automatically texture any 3D object with very
realistic results because we actually
based these materials on the very earliest version
of the Megascans library. So you would have
scan-based wear and tear. You would have
real-time 3D painting plus the real-time normal
editing capabilities of NDO all within one singular
texturing workflow. >>Galen: And obviously,
this time in the industry is very near and
dear to my heart. This tool set came out at a
very important time for me as an artist, and
I immediately knew this was something I needed
to add to my tool belt. So it was a really awesome time,
too, because this was actually when, Teddy, you and I met
for the first time digitally. But we were pen pals of
sorts over polycount, and you were sending me early
builds of both NDO and DDO, and I would eventually go on
to do a contest with Quixel, as well, and that was just a ton
of fun early on in my career. So the original
vision for the library was that of a
digital prop house. In Hollywood, creators can drive
to these massive prop houses, fill U-Hauls with
everything they possibly need to shoot their film. And effectively the
Megascans library is a digital version of that. We have a wide offering in
the library in that we offer not only surfaces, but 3D
assets, atlases, decals, vegetation, and
everything in between. Really when we go to
an Eco region to scan, we're getting everything
that we can really get our hands on, be
it the largest cliff wall down to the smallest
rock, twig, leaf, and branch. And while the Megascans
library is the cornerstone of what we'll be
discussing today, we also have other components
in Bridge and Mixer that we'll be covering briefly
here today in this talk. >>Teddy: So Bridge is
a kind of management system. It allows you to export
assets straight into Unreal with a single click. Mixer is a texturing tool that
allows you to 3D paint assets, create surfaces,
stylize things, combine procedurals with scan
data, and so much more. So today Quixel is a team of 150
people with scan teams spread across six different
continents, scanning content every single day in
any type of environment you could imagine, from
glaciers to jungles to savannas to temples. We really want to bring
you all of the content that you could possibly imagine. [MUSIC PLAYING] >>Galen: So at the
beginning of last year, we set out to do something
that we've actually never done before, which is create a
high-quality cinematic using all Megascans assets
inside of Unreal Engine. The cinematic was predicated
on an entire scan trip to Iceland that was
actually a month long. Our scan teams went out
in some of the worst possible conditions
for several weeks, and they came back
with some of the most diverse and
interesting Eco regions that we've ever captured inside
of the Megascans library. And what we set
out to achieve was create a photorealistic
environment and cinematic with a
very, very small team, all running in real-time
in Unreal Engine. And one of the things that was
really exciting about working on this project
specifically was that we had game-focused artists
that were actually working in coordination with
VFX level supervision. And this allowed
us to really create an awesome synergy between
the two industries, pull and learn from each other
in a new and exciting way here using real-time as the vessel. And one of the exciting
outcomes of working on this demo was that it brought us
very close with Epic Games. We were able to interface
with their teams across many steps of the way. And in working with Epic Games
on this project specifically, it became very clear to us
that our visions were very much aligned in making the
best technology and tools available to literally anyone. Epic has been focused
on multiple industries for a long time,
and what's exciting now being a part
of Epic Games is that we are helping
champion that convergent. And it has been exciting
to contribute even more to the industries
like automotive, which have very particular needs as
far as content is concerned, with elements that
are based truly in the real world on
physical products. For each of these
verticals, removing as much of the guesswork as possible
is essential for creating these high-quality renderings. And in working closer with
each of these industries, it's been exciting to
see these teams rely more on a library
of assets to where they remove a lot of the
guesswork for the work that they are doing. And as part of Epic
Games, we're really excited with what the team
at Twinmotion is doing now. We're actually collaborating
very closely with them in revitalizing some of the
content that was making up the original Twinmotion
library, and we'll be expanding that effort
in the coming months. Another exciting vertical that
Epic has been spearheading is the film initiative, and
it's been incredibly exciting to be a part of this
in providing content for demos such as
this, which we did for SIGGRAPH of last year. >>Teddy: And
this new workflow is called virtual production,
and virtual production essentially fuses
traditional filmmaking with real-time
workflows to allow for a next generation
of entertainment fueled by the digital prop
house that is Megascans. >>Galen: So
we've also created a really easy way for users
to browse the Megascans library in Bridge. And as you can see
here, you can browse with collections
or search features using names and keywords. But ultimately the idea
with this application is very simply to make it
incredibly simple to bring assets into Unreal Engine. So as you're seeing in these
really simple examples onscreen here, I'm exporting a
whole slew of assets. And with just a single click,
my shaders, my LOD chains, and everything is
set, and I can just start being creative
immediately inside of my scene. >>Teddy: Mixer
allows you to take creative control over the
entire Megascans library by defining your
own style, and you can create endless variations
of any single asset within the library. >>Galen: And one of
the big updates that we've made to Quixel Mixer, just
within the last couple weeks actually, is
full 3D functionality. Now, we can paint either an
existing Megascans library asset or you can bring
in your own custom asset like we're showing here. Stylization is also a
really important aspect of what we're hoping
to achieve with Mixer and bringing in a
physically-based scanned photorealistic asset
and maybe making it look like something that
could fit inside of Fortnite is something that is now
entirely possible using this tool. >>Teddy: As
you can see, this is not very fun
photoreal looking, but we've actually leveraged
a lot of the Megascans library and turned it into stylized
assets using Mixer. So this is a work in
progress, but let's look at some of the
techniques that we use to create some of these
assets here in this scene. So imagine you have this
Megascans asset or maybe an asset that
you've even scanned on your own or something that
you've sculpted in ZBrush. Now, you can leverage
the Megascans library to completely transform
the look of this asset and maybe fit it into a
different type of biome. But with Mixer, you
can also take it even a step further by
defining your own unique style. And this is what we see here. So here's a Smart
Material preset that we created using
Mixer that transforms any scanned asset into something
that looks a little bit more painterly. So here's another
example where we've taken the scan wheelbarrow
and transformed it into something much more
vibrant and painterly. And now, this re-textured asset
would make much more sense in a stylized scene like
the one we just saw. And so we're working to extend
Mixer with more functionality to allow you to stylize
assets in this fashion, also adding many more
Smart Materials that ship for free with the software. >>Galen: And again, drawing
back to our original experience in developing Quixel
Suite, Smart Materials are one of the most
important elements of this release
in that we really want users to very
quickly be able to make some simple modifications and
re-texture an asset incredibly fast. >>Teddy: On
top of that, we're working to bring multiple
texture set support and UDIM support to Mixer in
the next big release. >>Galen: Let's take a really
simple example of what Mixer can do here, and I'm going to
create a very simple tiling material. As you can see, I'm able to
browse the full Megascans library in the same way that we
were browsing Bridge earlier. And for this
specific example, I'm going to use a
height-based blend to bring some dirt
into some of the cracks and crevices of this existing
wooden plank texture. We also have some
pretty cool asset types. An atlas here is what I'm
going to be drawing on for this specific
example, and I want these leaves to actually be
setting in some of the cracks and just breaking up the
surface a little bit more than what we had before. And as you can see,
I'm just feathering the threshold slightly in order
to bring some of these elements into the range that
I'm looking for. And the same applies here for
this simple pebbled texture. And the next thing
I'm going to do here is actually bring this
distressed wood and bark texture into this asset,
and this will just sort of give it a little bit of a
break up on the surface. And lastly, I'll go ahead and
just add in some simple puddles here on the surface to
where we can actually get some really nice
reflections once we bring this into Unreal Engine. And as we were touching on
before in the Bridge section, it's really important
for making sure that it is easy to bring assets
directly into Unreal Engine. So as you can see here, I
just, with a single click, was able to export the mix and
the variation of what I just made in Mixer, and
I'm going to start painting a really simple blend
using a vertex blend material here inside of the Engine. Now, one of the things
that's really cool about this is that I'm able
to obviously paint either a clean and simple
version of the texture and mix that with a distressed
and more beat-up version of this texture and do that live
here inside of the viewport. Now, I'm using the Megascans
material that ships with our plug-in, but
it's important to note that if you're using
your own master material for your project, you
can actually use that master material as the input to
have all of your shaders be hooked up automatically. All you need to do
is just delineate each individual input, be it
albedo, roughness, normal, displacement, or what
have you, and you can construct these
shaders very quickly with a single click just
using Bridge and the Megascans plug-in inside of the Engine. So while we're
here in the Engine, why don't we go over the
Megascans plug-in in case you guys haven't seen it before? Now, as you can
see here, there's a couple simple check boxes
that are automatically on. The first one here is the
Auto Populate Foliage Painter, and what this does is,
for any scattered debris or any elements
that you might look to add as vegetation
into your level, those can actually be
indicated to go directly into the Foliage Painter. This allows you to drop
in a huge amount of plants and leaves, whatever you're
going to be scattering in your scene, and have
that directly dropped in so you don't have to go
from the content browser and drag that content back in. On top of that, if you
see below here this, is the Enable LOD Setup,
and what this will do is it will allow you to
actually have a LOD chain set up for anything that
you have downloaded. And what's super
convenient about this, obviously, is that since
everything in the Megascans library is LODed from LOD 0
all the way through LOD 5 as well as an included
cinematic high master mesh, you can actually have
Unreal automatically create that LOD chain for you. As long as you have the
existing inputs here to be able to create
that chain, all you need is to be able to
select inside of Bridge that the correct LOD for
your target mesh, and then all the other meshes that
will go below it that you have downloaded will actually
go directly into your LOD chain. And just to
illustrate this point, I've pulled up
the military water bottle that was used to
set dress this scene. And as you can see
here, on import, I was able to get
all my different LODs and everything set
up by default. Now, the only thing I need to do
after this is actually just indicate at what distance
I want each LOD to switch. Prompt Before Batch
Import does exactly what you would think it would do. The Enable
Displacement check box is here, which will allow
you to-- on any surface that you're going to be
using displacement maps, you can actually indicate
this, and when you turn up the tessellation on an
object, you actually get that undulation from
the displacement maps. Apply to Selection is very
simple in that if you have a surface that you're
exporting from Bridge, you can actually have objects
in your scene selected, and that will
apply it on import. And then if you
indicate that you want to import master
material textures, this will take away
any elements that you don't have for your material,
like curvature or ambient occlusion or anything therein. You can also override your
various materials here on a per object basis,
or per asset type rather. So you can say, for a
3D object, I can say, this is the master material
that I want, indicate it here from my level, and as long as
everything is named correctly, all the different inputs will
go directly into the shader that you indicate here. Same applies for surface
master materials, and plants are
also here as well. They're obviously a little
bit different of a setup than what you would have for a
regular surface in that there's some subsurface scattering
to take into consideration and just a couple
of the features that really make vegetation shine-- and lastly, the Create
Material Blend, which I just demoed in the previous frames. This is the ideal way to work
with Megascans in conjunction with Unreal Engine. We support all the
different Engine versions that you might see, and now
that we're a part of Epic, we'll be a lot more
proactive in actually getting these plug-ins ready to
go for subsequent versions of the Engine. Real quick, I'd like to show you
guys the master material that ships with the plug-in. And as you can see
here, it's very simple. We didn't want to over-complicate
this in that we really wanted just to give the
users enough features to be able to maybe make some
simple edits to their meshes or surfaces or
vegetation upon import. And here's an instance
for one of those assets after having gone through
the process of being imported into our scene. As you can see here, I can
change the tiling values, maybe offset the UVs
and U or V coordinates. I can change the albedo tint,
maybe indicate whether or not it's actually metallic,
and then, obviously, roughness and
normal intensity are super useful for just dialing
in exactly the look of the asset once you've dropped it in. If there are any other
features you guys would like to see that we could
ship with our next version of the plug-in, definitely
feel free to drop us a comment or a question
here at the end of the webinar. And like we mentioned before,
now that 3D functionality is inside of Quixel Mixer,
one of the things that you can do
here very quickly is bring existing Megascans
materials and assets and manipulate them
slightly in order to maybe ground them a
little bit more in my scene. Now, for the scene that we
were just working inside, I want to take this jerrycan
and make some very simple modifications to it in
grounding the asset, maybe have some mud and some
sand built up on the top. And what's really
cool about this is that I'm, again, using
Megascans materials in order to just very quickly make a
variation of this asset that fits more inside of the scene
that I'm working inside. I'm also bringing in
some simple imperfections and just adjusting the
contrast on this albedo, as well, because,
again, I really want just to ground this
asset a little bit more into what it is that
we're working inside. And of course, now just
bringing into our scene-- as you can see, with
just a single click, I've got this jerrycan
into my scene, and it's just so much more
grounded than it was before. >>Teddy: So we have a
lot of content in the making right now, and I thought I'd
show you some of the scan trips that we went on to
create these assets. Right here, we see
an arctic environment in the north of Sweden. One of the most highly requested
materials in the Megascans library is snow, and so we
went here for a couple of weeks to scan basically any type
of snow you could imagine, both as surfaces and 3D assets. We also scanned an old
abandoned mansion straight out of a horror movie,
essentially, some cave systems, old, derelict, abandoned
factories and industrial sites, abandoned hospitals. And if you're an avid user
of the Megascans library, you might recognize some
of these environments because they actually
already exist to a certain extent
in the library. This is from our
recent Japan trip, and we went here to primarily
scan ancient temples, but we also captured villages,
some city materials, nature, just a whole bunch of things
that will allow you to create Japan in great detail. So we go on all of these trips
purely based on requests. So if you have something
very specific in mind that you absolutely
need, never hesitate to reach out to us because
that's exactly how we build the library. No request is too insane. Just shoot it our way,
and you might be lucky. [MUSIC PLAYING] >>Galen: So we've
spent the better part of eight years creating tutorial
content on our YouTube channel, and we're continuing that in
a really exciting way going forward. We'll be making a wide
variety of different tutorials and deconstructing environments
that we find to be particularly interesting for our audience. We're giving you guys
a quick sneak peek at one of the upcoming
tutorials that we'll be doing an actual mini series
on here inside of Unreal Engine. One of the things
that we're really excited to announce today
is that every tutorial and environment that we'll
be creating going forward will actually be
free and available for any user in the Unreal
Engine Marketplace to download. We're really excited about this
because it will allow our users the ability to
follow along with us and really be able
to deconstruct all the elements that make
up these environments. >>Teddy: And
here's another environment that we're looking forward to
putting up on the Marketplace. All of these environments
serve a greater purpose of showing how creative you can
be with the Megascans library and also leveraging the tool set
that comes with the Megascans ecosystem-- so for instance,
taking Megascans assets and re-texturing them,
bringing in your own assets, and texturing them with
Megascans materials to kind of just bring
everything together. So for these tutorial
series, we really want to make it very easy for
you to dive into the ecosystem, to grab these environments,
to be in the environments, just help demystify the
process of environment creation as much as we possibly can. This is something that
we're looking forward to having up on the
Marketplace very soon. So stay tuned. >>Galen: Teddy,
why don't you talk a little bit about some
of the new elements that'll be coming into the library? >>Teddy: Sure. One of the new elements
that we're introducing is modular content,
essentially real-world, 3D objects that
have been conformed to very specific measurements
so that they work very nicely with procedural systems. >>Galen: One new assets
type that we're really excited to dive even
further into is drone scans. We've built an entire
team around drones, and we're really excited
about the types of content that are actually coming
out of this initiative. So definitely keep your eyes
out for some amazing drone scans coming up in the near future. Before we start taking some
of your guys' questions, there's a couple
other things that I'd like to highlight
here just in case you haven't seen some
the resources that are available for you
in the Quixel community, the first resource
being the forum. And this is just a great
place to go in case you have any questions that
you think might have already been answered by some of the
other users in the community. On top of that,
you're able to create support tickets that
will allow you to be put in contact with our team. All of our tickets end up having
a very quick response time. So feel free to reach
out to us on the forum if you haven't had a chance
to check this out yet. We've recently revitalized
the educational offering, and while it's important
to note that if you are an educator or a student
that is working inside of the Unreal Engine
ecosystem, you do have access to everything for free that
we mentioned today, including Bridge, Mixer, and the entire
breadth of the Megascans library, however,
it's important to note that if you're an institution
that might be teaching other tools, we do
have an offering that will fit your needs. While it is a limited offering
of in the hundreds of assets, still, you have access
to Bridge and Mixer available for your educators
and all the students at your school. It's a really simple
application process. So feel free to check out our
site in case you haven't already. We've also been hard at
work on our Instagram page, and we curate some amazing
content from our community here that's definitely worth checking
out if you haven't already. Here you'll see updates
for livestreams as well as any type of
news that might come out of the community. And just in case you
haven't seen already, we do lots of puns,
so fair warning. >>Teddy: And Instagram
is actually a great way to stay up to date with
all of the new content that we put up in the library. We create visualizations
of this content to help inspire you
creatively, and here are a few of those renders. >>Galen: And the
last thing that we'd like to point you guys towards
is definitely our YouTube channel, and we'll be
doing a ton of content on this channel over
the coming years, and we're still playing around
with the format a little bit here, so you might see a wide
variety of different content here, be it Mixer tutorials,
environment breakdowns, features for actual
projects that are using Megascans, and the like. Also, if you guys
have any general ideas about the types of
content that you'd like to see from our
channel going forward, definitely feel free
to drop us a comment or leave us a question here
at the end of the webinar. We'd really love to
hear what you guys want. And the most requested
asset type by far and away has always been trees. And we have heard you
guys loud and clear. >>Teddy: Yeah, for
about three years now, we've been working
on developing a tree pipeline to allow for
photorealistic real-time trees. And while we're not done yet, we
wanted to give you a sneak peek into some of that work. >>Galen: Well,
thank you, guys, so much for tuning
into the webinar today. We're really excited
about everything that's coming in the future. And now that we're a
part of Epic Games, the exciting part
truly is that they're looking to put rocket fuel into
everything that we were already doing. So the future is
incredibly bright, and we're just
excited to have you guys along for the ride with us. >>Teddy: We hope
you had fun watching this. There will obviously
be much more coming than what
we've covered today, and now we're super pumped
to take your questions. So feel free to ask
whatever you like.
It's sad that epic is getting so much hate. Making resources like quixel available to everyone for free (within the context of their engine) helps indie devs from falling too far behind the AAA scene.
Stuff like this scares me, I take a game Dev course at university, everything I have learned at uni just gets turned to dust with this. There's going to be no jobs for 3d modellers and texture work 🤷♀️
Thank you so much for sharing this! Quixel looks like a crazy advanced/alternate version of the Allegorithmic Suite. I'm definitely gonna check it out down the line!