Quixel Mixer for Dummies! Complete Beginner's Guide to Quixel Mixer

Quixel Mixer for Dummies through the basics of Quixel Mixer so you can get started fast while still having a Beginner's Guide to Quixel Mixer shares some features with substance by algorithmic except it's extremely helpful when it comes to using it with mega scans and Unreal Engine currently mixer is completely free even for non subscribers so it's a great time to try it out to download Quixel Mixer go to quixel.com/mixer and you can click this button that says download mixer free once you've downloaded the Installer run through it to install Quixel Mixer onto your machine upon opening the new program you'll need to create a new project by clicking this plus icon call mine testing and then create a new mix by clicking this button up here I will also call this test mix now you can choose your PBR workflow I'll stick with specular and you're working resolution which these can be changed later when you're ready click OK and now your project will be open now a couple of things that you'll need to set before you get started is to go up to edit and preferences and now you'll need to choose where you want your mixer files to be stored as well as where your local library of mega scans assets is if you are a user of mega scans either for Unreal Engine or for any other application you'll need to browse to wherever your library of downloaded assets is once you've got all of that sorted out click Save and you're ready to get started as far as the windows that you can see here there's a viewport window where you can see what you're working on a local library that contains all of the mega scans assets that you've downloaded an online library where you can choose any of the assets in the mega scans library as long as you sign in a layers window that displays all of the layers in the scene a display window where you can change settings that have to do with the display performance for the performance settings and an export window where you can export whatever you've been working on in order to access the online assets you'll need to sign in with your mega scans account now since I'm an unreal developer I can sign in with epic games and since unlimited free mega scans asset are available to Unreal developers I now have infinite points on my balance and can download whatever I want let's go over the different kinds of layers that exist in mixer now the first one that will always be in your project is a plane this is what you're looking at right now and it's just a base geometry so you can choose the size of this plane I could make it ten by ten meters if that's how large of them makes ours making or I could make it one by one if I wanted to be much smaller and you can also choose the working resolution to choose whether you'd like it to be 4k or 8k that's experimental so be careful with using 8k I'm going to be sticking with 2k resolution and a 2 by 2 meter playing for this project right here but we may work with a different size later in the video the first kind of layer is a surface layer now this could be a material or it could be any kind of surface that you import so to add a surface layer click right here and by default you'll be sent to your local library but you can also go to the online library to add in a material that you don't yet have access to I'll start with these wet sand footprints let's go over how to navigate in this window to scroll in and out you're gonna scroll your mouse wheel to pan side-to-side hold down the mouse wheel and to rotate around hold alt and left-click and drag you can also zoom in and out by alt right clicking and dragging now let's go over some of the settings in here the height intensity is one of the most important ones and it's what tells the render how you want the displacement to be displayed so the high frequency is gonna look at the high details on whatever it is that you are displacing and it will increase it or decrease it depending on what you set this to the low frequency does the same except for the lower points in the data so you can use this to add a lot of depth but sometimes it'll look a little weird in the silhouette if you do it too much and those are some of the basic settings for the surface materials now let's move on to this next one the decal layer so if I add this I can add any given decal to my scene and I would go online perhaps to search for decals and once you find one that you would like to use you can select it in the online tab choose download and once it is downloaded you can easily click it and drag it into the scene over whatever you'd like it to be placed on already this is looking pretty cool so I can change a lot of settings now I can choose whether it is blending from above from below or opacity masked which is what I'm going to be using you can choose the threshold which chooses where it's going to end up the radius that affects how it blends with the materials around it you can make it slightly transparent with this opacity slider now trap to base is an interesting one this is going to make it mesh perfectly with the contours of the sand as long as you're placing it on sin and if I were to remove this it would become completely flat but then we would have some of this drop off right on the edge and so we're gonna have to find ways to deal with that if that's what we end up doing so I don't mind a little rap to base so that's what I'm going to have it at right now now you can also choose to remove the details of the base so I think the best way to learn about this one is just to see it in action so right now it's at seven which is max based detail removal now if I went to zero this is what we have now and you can see that the grains of sand the roughness textures of the grains of sin that is now carrying over onto the manhole as well as the footprints it seems so for something like a manhole which wouldn't receive footprints since this appears to be a concrete and metal you'd want to remove the base details as much as possible because that is what's going to distinguish it from the surroundings you can also adjust the high frequency and low frequency of decals as well to make it jut out even further now if you feel like somehow you've ruined the settings for your decal what you can always do is click on this reset values and it will set right back to where it was remember you can choose where the manhole will be placed just by sliding the offset you can also rotate and with decals you can rotate on an individual degree basis it doesn't have to be 90 degrees at a time because these are like stickers that are being slapped on as opposed to base materials they can only be rotated a certain amount you can also scale them up or down if you feel that they need to be larger or smaller if you wanted a decal to be tiled you could allow tiling to occur by checking tile X or tile Y or both of them and you can choose how many repetitions you want for each axis now the next kind of a layer is a solid layer now it's just going to be a solid color and something that I recommend for all of your projects is that you keep a solid layer at the very bottom of each mix and you can rename it by double-clicking on it and rename it into a base layer and then you can build all of your materials on top of that and now we have more options for each of the materials above such as the sand which we can now choose to blend from above or from below I'm going to choose from above and now we can mess with the threshold like so and with the manhole we can choose to adjust the threshold with this as well in response to the movement we made with the sand this just ensures that we have maximum custom ability as far as all of the other materials besides the base layer now let's move on to one of my favorite layers the liquid layer this is going to add a solid liquid plane to whatever you're working on and you can place it at any given height and now I can fill the footprints with water or something similar to that and it gives off an incredibly cool effect I really really enjoy so you can edit much about this such as the threshold which you've already seen used the radius and again notice how it is seeping in as I increase the radius I would definitely suggest experimenting with radius yourself to truly learn about how it all works you've got the detail you've got the surface and the depth and then you have moist and this is one of the more important ones so the threshold with moist is exactly what it sounds like it's going to bring moisture to everything around it so now it looks like mud which is a cool effect on its own I'm gonna keep the moisture pretty low though I want this to look like a beach with a manhole a mysterious one you can also choose the radius for the moisture if you ever lose your place with these moisture settings or you can't figure out how to get him back to default because for some reason they don't have a return to default settings next to this you can always just add another liquid layer which will contain the default settings and you can just copy them over remember you can change the diffuse color of the water as well however the default color for this water works really really well now the next layer is very interesting it's a noise layer and it's gonna do some pretty interesting things to your scene as you can see it seems to add curvature to the entire plane including the manhole which we don't want that so I'm gonna bring the manhole above the noise so that it is overlaid on top of that and as you can see that seems to work out pretty well now let's talk about this noise there's lots and lots of settings in here that you can mess with one of them the amplitude is going to change how extreme the effect is the frequency has to do with increasing the number of bumps per area as you can see a lot of this is going to take some experimentation to learn all the different settings octaves is going to increase the detail of this noise gives it a really crusty look you didn't you could increase it all the way and then decrease the frequency and what that will have is just a rocky sand dry effect because now this sand looks pretty dry compared to how it did like this so I'm just going to use it to create a bit of a rolling hill effect on this area I'm also going to bring up the manhole a bit by adjusting the threshold and you may start to notice something like this which is easily fixable all you need to do is work with the radius a little bit maybe bring it down just a little bit more now the only concern here is that I don't want anything to come over the manhole too much and distract from that so if I were to increase the amplitude so much that you have this giant lip which clearly does not look very good that would be a big problem so don't bring the amplitude up that much something like this is absolutely acceptable just keep playing with the settings until you see something that you really like and then you can sit with that so I'm going to mess with the noise just a bit more on this and well that's that and if you do end up having any big problems you can always offset the texture so that there's no parts that are going to affect it too much you probably don't want footprints going under this I want to seem like it was installed beforehand so try to minimize that as much as you can you always want to be thinking about the story of the material that you're making this looks pretty good to me this looks very good remember on the flip side of that you can always adjust the placement of the manhole itself after that there is only one more layer and that is the paint layer now with painting you can do a whole lot of things you can import an image you can draw on it there's so much that you can do and you'll get this brush interface with all these kinds of different brushes you'll start out with this brush and you can edit the curve with these settings right here and then you can begin to draw a displacement on I'm going to just click on the diffuse and now I can just draw onto the diffuse itself remember you can adjust the diffuse color on this side this time so if it was graffiti we could turn it light-blue hit apply and for this we probably want a smaller brush size so you can change the brush settings up here not that small you could draw a big old letter in here and then you can erase with the eraser tool very simply very nice now if you were doing graffiti I'll probably change the opacity downwards a little bit because you'd want color to show through because spray paint usually fades over time remember remembering story as you're creating it's very important as you can see as you draw over certain parts again it'll become brighter and that is realistic if you are doing spray paint remember that as you spray over certain parts it has the same effect because you're adding more layers of paint onto the original stroke if you want to learn about graffiti I would go on Google and find some reference images for it and also remember that the effect is going to bleed a little bit so turn the opacity way down and get a bigger brush and you can start bleeding it to other parts of need mesh and that is one way that you can use the paint layer another way is to put textures mess with the gloss so you want a one specific streak to be extremely glossy you can take this brush turn the gloss white apply start drawing on this one spot and now if you look at it in the sunlight you can see that it is much more glossy just by painting on it so I probably wouldn't make it that opaque and you can always erase but it's as if you can draw moisture onto the surface and it's a very helpful thing so I'm going to turn the opacity down I can just start clicking and it's like I'm adding little spots of irregularity and it just adds just a small that small touch but it could be worth a whole lot here seen so those are the basics of quick slow mixer for complete beginners if this video helps you out consider leaving a like and subscribing to this for more content similar to this and with that have fun creating and I hope you have an excellent day

Channel: Daniel Krafft

Views: 127,954

Keywords: quixel, quixel mixer, megascans, quixel mixer tutorial, quixel mixer guide, megascans tutorial, megascans guide, texture creation, photogrammetry texturing, quixel texturing, megascans texturing, ue4, pbr, textures, texturing, materials, 3d, create, 3d art, speed, photogrammetry, mixer, bridge, environment, environment art, art, real-time, epic, epic games, quixel megascans, unreal engine 4, unreal engine 4.24, computer graphics, game development for beginners, unreal engine

Id: iJRl1zn9PGw

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 25 2019