Megascans Plugin for Unreal Engine: Vertex Blend Material 

I've watched a lot of tutorials from you, and I'm currently watching the realistic folliage tutorial that you made. Can't wait to the next tutorials.

@@lucascastro6930 hey glad you like them, I am certainly gonna make something cool with this update

yes please :>

I always watch your tutorials, they are very good. :-)

;)

I am having a heck of a time trying to figure out the first step to getting this working with UE4. I am expert at so many facets of UE4 but this 3rd party stuff throws me for a loop. You say you did this MEGASCAN stuff INSIUDE UE4? I looked for a 'MEGASCANS Plugin and for a 'Vertex-Blend-Plugin' but no luck,. I can only find what they call an 'organizational' tool? (which is the last thing I need...) called 'BRIDGE'. BUT You seem to be using BRIDGE as a real TOOL instead of a Filing Cabinet AND *from within UE4???* I have tried for over a year to understand their weird way of interfacing with UE4,. I just don't get it,. Could you maybe give me an enlightening description and a few simple steps without all their flashy confusing marketing? Help me out and I'll send my almost 3,000 loyal subscribers your way!! (From my main channel: RU-vid.com/NextWorldVR )

​@@WoodysAR After downloading Bridge Tool and installing it, at first run it will ask you to set; DCC/Engine, select Unreal Engine here. Under that it will ask you a folder where your downloaded library will be. This is not the actual plug-in, set a folder you want and then hit "save". Now sign in with Epic account in Bridge Program which you've linked(on Quixel site) before. Download one of the materials. When it is completed, on right panel you will have another tab that's called "Export Settings". Click on that, select Export to: Unreal Engine, Engine Version: to your latest installed version (it is 4.25 for me), and then on Installation Folder: select where your engine's plugins are installed, which was in my case "C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_4.25\Engine\Plugins" ***IMPORTANT*** DO NOT set Program Files (x86) on that path, that will give you an error on exporting. If that happens, you should delete that and reinstall plugin into correct folder. Actual plugin will then be installed. Leave "Project Location" empty since you will be running Bridge and Unreal Engine at the same time and as soon as you export, it will export the materials to your active(opened) project. Now start your Unreal Engine version you've installed the plugin in; you should have "Megascan Link with Bridge" Tool on top. You can now hit export on Bridge Program, it will detect running Unreal Engine background and will install your new materials inside your content folder under "Megascan" name, have fun :) ------ Edit: This was the original info i installed mine from: help.quixel.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002127457-Installing-the-Megascans-Plugin-for-UE4-on-Windows Might help you better than my explanation. Good luck mate. ------ How Texturing Works: Materials you exported from Bridge into Unreal Engine will have a "Material Instance" for each different material. By using customization options they added inside those material instances; you can change tiling, rotating tiling; customizing colors, changing constrass/brighness/saturation; changing roughness amounts; increasing/decreasing normal strengh etc.. You pretty much have everything to do your texturing inside Unreal for assets(most likely environment assets) where you can use tiling materials. For example for testing; i re-made the whole texturing inside Unreal for one of my marketplace asset pack by using those and decided to use this method for my personal project. I might only need to use Mixer to create textures for unique models (like character assets) to have some curvature maps etc. to give them more "unique" look.

👀👀👀

Unity folks pressed that button.

@@rizkyramadhan8594 😂

@@rizkyramadhan8594 haha, Unity folk here, no, that’s crazy talk. I and many others would definitely thumbs this up. This is a great tutorial and great use of Quixel Megascans... taking notes to implement in Unity as it would be fairly straightforward and not that complicated (standard video game tech art techniques). However they went ahead and added tons of options that I loved... the adjustment HSV/Tint controls add so much power to what’s already there, the dirt layer gets tweaked from a basic brown muddy looking to lighter dust like brick sand like, amazing. Also wondering if the height map blending is a basic ‘slope/offset equation’ or ‘smooth step’ with the vertex color value doing the threshold amount or something specific because it does look amazing.

@@rizkyramadhan8594 Not Unity , Adobe if u know what i mean :D

I think its "Substance" folk who click thumbs down. hehehehe

Thank you so much for sharing this it helped a lot!

Thanks bro!

thanks men!

This should be a sticked comment. Absolute life saving comment right here.

Thanks It worked for me too! Displacement maps weren't there when I exported the blended material. In order to fix it, I just dragged the missing displacement maps from the original materials to the final blended material slots. Also the plane I was using didn't have enough vertex, so I went back to max and created a higher poly plane and this fixed the problem.

*Adobe and Epic.

Pretty sure this has been used in games for years :D

Do it -Ben Stiller

Why not?

@@01oo011 no i was being serious, how he says "do it" in a deep voice to make the person do it quicker, ill play his game if he made one

@3D Modeller i asked no question

@@OnsideHaddock72 lol y’all are weird 🤣

Don't count out software like Substance yet.. How many games can be made with 1 library before people start to go "Oh.. I know that grass." New asset and content will always need to be created, whether it's new photoscans or new procedurally generated materials or sculpted models.

@@TheRealGunfish I have been gaming for decades and never once in my life said or heard someone saying that they have seen this grass somewhere else. If there is someone on this planet who would say that, they really need to re-evaluate their life. May be a character, or a hero asset.. but not grass or even slabs

You're mistaken if you think environment creation this is all what is it about... guess when you will have to create a special environment required for a game or some set of textures very specific well you won't find them on quixer am saying so because I have been in this situation before quixel is really great I love them for Making life easier but no you can't just live only on quixer suite it's almost impossible at least for now.

@@simomessek934 not sure what I get you are saying or how you reached that conclusion. Nobody said that megascans are going to eliminate the need for hand or custom textures e.g. hero assets or human skin at least. However, they will help with the majority of the environment textures.

I would argue actually to not tessellate your meshes too much. If there's some space between the verts, it creates rooms for some nice gradients between materials. Try it out, it depends on what you're trying to build so it's hard to say how many verts per 100 units, one might be all you need actually.

On plane surfaces 1 polygon per square meter is pretty standard at the moment in the industry! but you can go crazy with good LoDs and tesselation

OK, I just tried this.....game changer!

what's the solution? did you find any?

@@nelosantaclara6900 yep just followed the instructions here and it now works fine. :) help.quixel.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360013673358-Unreal-Engine-4-25-3-Vertex-Blend-Material-problems

Yeah, I didn't get it with all the updates, etc.

Probably didn't save the material

Will do! :)

​@@teddygbg I can't wait! thx

Hey :) Just wanted to ask, has that tutorial been made yet? Or is it still in the works? :)

me too ,why

help.quixel.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360013673358-Unreal-Engine-4-25-3-Vertex-Blend-Material-problems

@@dannybznz thanks ,it works

@@dannybznz thanks it works and this link was helpful too: help.quixel.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360009717918-Could-not-send-data-over-Port-13428-13429-error-in-Bridge-when-exporting-to-Maya-2018-on-Mac-OS

@@yapanwolf None of these worked for me.

i cant too

You need a plane with vertex's added to it. Watch a blender tutorial explaining how to make a plane, subdivide it to add vertx, then export to unreal and you can paint then

@@duffy_115 How can I apply this for landscaping? When I transferred it from the blender, it became a static mesh. Can I convert it to landscape? In what format do I need to export?

@@mobildisko579 in blender you need to use the landscape add on and you can make a custom landscape and use how many polygons you like, more polygons = more vertices to paint on = more intensive on pc. Then generate a material blend watching the quixel tutorial on youtube, apply to your landscape model (Export this as an FBX) then apply the material blend to landscape model

@@duffy_115 Your mean add a single vertx point in the center of every subdivision or just subdivide de whole mesh?

what a simple creature!

me also

No, It is Immpossible

Yes! It’s in the works.

@@teddygbg That would be great! Setting up layered landscape materials is a painfully tedious process, and it would be incredibly helpful if you could automate that for us.

@@teddygbg Wait! you are Director @ Quixel!

@@teddygbg Omg please thank you

You need the create the mesh with sufficient vertices in a 3D tool like Blender or Maya and then bring that into UE4. You cannot increase the vertices of a mesh inside UE4.

@@mohidbaig4000, Man, this makes me appreciate UE5 modeling tools SO much more

Those are not three Albedo Textures, they are three Materials.

@@cr3ap3r1 Thx, yea I tried albedo first then figured out they are material instances so I tried that. It does create the vertex Paint Material in a new folder but that material is blank. I opened it up and nothing from the textures is emplaced. So, I can check the lil boxes and drag n drop them in place, save, but is still blank. Will try again after I have lunch.

did you find a solution for this issue? i am having the same problem.

I also had the same problem, the solution I found is to import the mesh as fbx and not with datasmith

Have the same problem did you find a solution?

@@bus4anbus4an28 try this. It maybe a common issue. I haven't had chance to take a proper look yet: help.quixel.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360013673358-Unreal-Engine-4-25-3-Vertex-Blend-Material-problems

Hi Anuj, This should help. Followed these steps and got it to work. help.quixel.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360013673358-Unreal-Engine-4-25-3-Vertex-Blend-Material-problems?input_string=Vertex%20blend

@@siddharthbaxi1956 thanks a lot for the link! I actually tried these exact steps yesterday before the workaround post was put up, but for some reason, even in the new project, the blend materials weren't working. If the workaround worked for you, do you mind sharing the SurfaceBlend_MasterMaterial file with me? It should be located in your ProjectFolder/Content/MSPresets/SurfaceBlend_MasterMaterial folder. Thanks, Anuj.

You actually can, look for it. Lino did it I think

Look for Blendit , same as this

@@Chanou86 I've seen it, it looks to be more for objects than material blending.