Quixel Mixer 2021 Is AWESOME ...and Free!

hello ladies and gentlemen it's mike here at game from scratch and i've got some excellent news for you and that is that qixel mixer is now available the 2021 edition now if you've never heard of this quicksilver mixer is an excellent texturing tool and even better it is an excellent free texturing tool it's probably the closest competitor that substance painter has if you're trying to create textures for your 3d models you are going to love quixle mixer especially again it is free about a year and a bit back epic games acquired it and what they did is basically made it available for free for everybody plus quick souls mega scans textures are free for unreal engine users and cheaper for everyone else to use there's another product which acts as kind of a layer or you could say bridge between your textures their textures and so on and your game engines and editing tools of choice called qixel bridge which is also free but today we're talking specifically about quixote mixer and this program is excellent for texturing so we're going to start with a bit of a hands-on demo and one of the big new things here is they've got support for udem support we've also got a number of new examples when you first fire it up there's a number of sample mixes to start from and we are going to use the crunch robot example so i'm going to go ahead and open that guy up you can do this yourself you go ahead and download it these will be pre-configured for you it's gonna take a little bit of time for this guy to load up as you can see there are 30 layers of textures on this guy it is a bit of a a bit of a beast of a project so i'm going to pause it while it's loading okay so for the record that only took about 20 or 30 more seconds it wasn't like each stage was the same amount of time but what you see here this is a 3d model being textured using mixer's approach and the way mixer started out is you would mix textures together or mix procedural textures together to create uh texture maps for your object when you're done here you can export out your results you can have it generate your albedo metal diffuse specular roughness basically your typical pbr base rendering workflow you can have it export out all of the texture maps you'd require the big new thing you'll notice here is texture sets and this is actually a bit of a game changer something an entire industry has been moving towards you can see them once again here in this global one we have arms head torso and legs so you see the head is just that one the torso is just that one the arms predictably are those ones and then your legs are those ones and what you're using here is something called you dim you dm literally just stands for u and dimensional and what it is is a tile based approach to applying multiple textures to a single object so you can have multiple texture maps in here but the cool thing here is with this new support let's go back here to global so we got them all selected if i have all of these selected and i do a painting property it will paint across them so if i'm doing some kind of like a normal map thing and i paint a stripe down this here and here it will automatically just work for me and paint it on the head texture and on the body texture it makes your life so much nicer but it also means that you can work with texture maps that logically make sense whereas before we used to do is make a really large unwrapped texture and you would have like the head in you know a portion of it the arms in another portion of it now you can kind of logically group your textures together there's also some efficiency optimizations you can work with as well and most of the major commercial game engines support udem textures i don't think adobe supports ud by the way but um unity and unreal do i think cryengine does i think lumberyard does udem is becoming an open standard so if they don't they will in the future so udem is definitely the star of the show here but it is not the only new feature in mixer 2021 another really nice thing that they did is if we go over to the local library and i go here to smart materials you're going to see there are a hundred and one smart materials here these are basically pre-defined or configured materials i'm going to apply one globally so let's pick one that we like the look of so we got a number of different ones here so here's scuffed plastic and what i just did is applied it on top of everything so this material is actually going to be above everything else in the hierarchy so it's actually going to take a little bit of time too but this smart material is basically a mix that they've configured for you there are a number of properties you can tweak on it and what this will ultimately do is paint the entire guy scuffed blue there we go so we can see it i think it's still updating so we need there we go it went across all of the different areas there this is that material now you can see there are a number of things that that make it up you can configure each one of them you can tweak them out you can change the coloring and so on so instead of scuff blue we wanted like scuffed red we can easily tweak those materials so there is a number of things you can configure with with these smart materials well the reason why i'm talking about smart materials today is this 101 everything you see here this was added specifically to uh mixer 2021 this is uh the six pack of such by the way these are huge when you choose to install it you can say add the smart materials pack six that is what you are seeing here so all of these materials are new to mixer there are five other packs you can use as well and there's no requirement here like for example if you want to use the mega scans textures and libraries in your own game that isn't uh necessarily using unreal engine well you got to pay a license for that for this these smart materials you can use them however you want now do keep in mind you're working with these real high level composited uh materials right here uh but later on you're going to be actually exporting out normal textures so these aren't there's no performance ramification of these these are like building block materials for you so what they did is they added 101 new materials and there are five other libraries worth of materials mind you at three gigabytes a piece so do be a little hesitant before you add these before your download but just to be aware 100 new materials you can work with no license encumbrances on them so all right let's go ahead on over back to the release notes learn a little bit more about this release so if you're interested in grabbing mixer itself as i mentioned it is a free download i think it's windows and mac that's going to automatically start the download so i can't find that way uh but i do believe it's windows and mac i don't think there is a linux client but uh give me once download for windows other versions okay we'll find out right now uh so we've got windows and mac yeah sorry linux there is no linux version i do not know if it runs in um some kind of an emulation layer if it does let me know in the comments down below and yes i know wine is not an emulator and yes i know wine stands for wine is not an emulator it's just easier shorthand to say an emulation layer so what is actually new in this release we're going to head on over to the qixel blog and we're going to check out the multiple texture set and you didn't blog post which is going to tell you the big thing now multiple texture sets is basically how they're supporting ud we saw that earlier on uh when we were over here uh actually looking at our object uh here the multiple texture sets like so and that can work with you dim you dim is a way of having multiple textures on the same object uh and you can paint across them so you have the texture set for the head the body the arms and so on it's really going to change your workflow and it's very very nice and again if you tick things off it won't paint across them when you're working on those particular texture maps so it will make udem painting so much easier to work with you do have tools obviously for editing and working with those texture sets and you've got the ability to focus in and there's a focus area section uh you can turn that on and off so you can see it it's hiding or graying out the areas that are not currently active we saw that in action just a minute ago so that is a new feature there as well um there's also the ability to flatten mixes this is actually kind of cool you can take an entire layer set and flatten it down now do realize though that this if you flatten it and mix down you're going to get the same outputs but you're not going to be able to edit it anymore this is a destructive change so it will result in a faster output you're just going to lose the configurability you had before so it's basically a way of baking your mixes out again destructive workflow so do that only when you're sure you want to and here you can see the 100 new smart materials were added in the part the pack so 100 new materials so now there's almost 400 of them they are completely free for commercial use which is really awesome also by the way you create your own smart materials and add them there as well improved layer stack interactions exporting 3d assets to your library so when you're happy with your texture 3d model you can now export it to your local library uh by the way you do have a library here it's a local library i'm only showing smart materials so far but you can also have 3d objects there as well and you can bring some in from the mega scans collection as well by the way so you've now got the ability to export your textured model out to that library to work with for future things we have the new examples so this one this one this one plus the one we just saw in action uh which is the crunch robot those weirdly enough are only available these ones are available so this guy and this guy are available in the 3d model support so over here also when you start a new mix so we'll just create a new one we won't save my changes when you're setting up a new mix you can basically just choose the model that you want to work with so you can have a 3d asset and for example if i want to use parking meter i could use that as my base 3d asset apparently you get a giant question mark while it's loading you can do it like so but also you have the ability to bring in your own object so custom model and then you can import in an obj or an fbx file if you wish that's going to be the object you're going to paint on or of course you can use everybody's favorite shader ball uh and this is sort of the hello world of the texturing world uh that guy right there so uh yeah that that is the new feature and functionality there as well not sure how much else there is there again free for commercial use including the asset so all of those all right they're contradicting themselves there 600 smart materials and up here they say 400 i'm not sure what the difference is all i know is you are getting an absolute ton of smart materials in this release on top of all the painting functionality and you can use this all completely free doesn't matter if you're using unity like a doe engine whatever the only thing that you're going to run into a license issue on is if you're using a mega scanned asset that isn't given away explicitly for free there are a number of free mega scan assets by the way as well but the commercial mega scan stuff you either need to have a mega scans license or be using unreal engine but otherwise everything you saw today every single thing i demonstrated today can be used free in your own commercial project so if you're looking for a texture painting application and you're not using linux it is hard to beat qixel mixer and the 2021 release the big thing here of course is the new unim 100 new smart materials uh the ability to collapse layers all really nice stuff that is going to make this tool even better do check it out and this is i gotta say epic games is the one company when they acquire someone i don't feel dread because they always make it better for the end developer even if you're not using unreal engine uh so let me know what you think of qixel mixer and yeah i will talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 41,692

Keywords: 2021, Bridge, Epic, Epic Games, Free, Game Development, Game Engine, GameDev, Mixer, QUixel, Quixel Mixer, Release, Software, Substance, Substance Painter, Texture Map, Texturing, UDIM, UE4, UE5, Unreal Engine

Id: v2rVJa3RDAk

Length: 10min 50sec (650 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021