@blurymind studios don’t often disclose exactly what software they use unless it’s for Autodesk marketing campaigns. Pretty much all studios are gonna have a Photoshop subscription anyway so a Quixel license on top of that is not very expensive.
Quixel and Substance are both useful software and chances are that studios are gonna use them both. There’s really no need for this “versus” mentality so can we please stop talking about that in this thread about Quixel.
Actually, for $100, I might get Quixel just for kicks. It’s always nice to have choice.
I’d have done so a long time ago if it was a standalone application; I just hate Photoshop. It makes me feel like I need a shower every time I run it.
Looking forward about the Blender workflow tutorial. BTW what about Megascan? Page is still “coming soon”
Oh great!
A legitimate blender tutorial for quixel,
from people who actually know what they are talking about this time 
Which outputs does it give you? I haven’t tried the Blender-specific preset yet, but I was guessing it would be similar to the Generic PBR preset. I can tell you what I was using for that, if it would help.
Megascans is the new primary focus now that 2.0 is out. Whether that means it’s out in a month, or six months, is anybody’s guess. Here’s hoping it’s sooner than later!
@platecaptain - It gives you diffuse, normal, refl_at_nrm, roughness and spec_color. And to note on the roughness and refl_at_nrm, when you load them up in the image editor, they both have some transparency to the layer. This doesn’t seem to be the case when you load them in Photoshop so I’m guessing that they are intended to be Non-Color Data. And the spec_color isn’t a black and white image.
Oh, that’s interesting. I’ll be playing around with it later tonight; I’ll see if I can get any good results. If not, hopefully that Blender tutorial is helpful.
Okay, I’m not sure what the refl_at_nrm map is for yet, but I’m getting pretty good results without it so far. My base node setup looks like this:
There are far bigger experts than me out there, though, so maybe someone will chime in and give some tips for better/more accurate ways to use the maps. In the meantime, I’ll wait to check out Quixel’s upcoming tutorial.
Just guessing from the map names, it’s probably something similar to this:
EDIT: forgot spec color in that pic, it probably just goes on the glossy shader color input like you had it.
That’s about where I arrived at, and it looked decent just not great. And it didn’t seem to provide the cleanest results when mixing wildly different materials like worn wood, bare aluminum and mat rubber. Really interested to see how Quixel suggests connecting all these.
For anyone who’s interested and impatient like me, here’s a setup that’s given me really good results so far. The biggest thing to note here is the Glossy mode of ‘Sharp’. The default GGX gives way too rough of a texture on the gloss. I’ll post a sample render as soon as I put one together.
Roughness input doesn’t do anything when set to sharp.
Hm. Fail on my part.
Might as well link Cynicat’s specular workflow video here,
IRT FDFXD: That video is great, thank you for the link.
IRT the idea that Quixel isn’t used anywhere professionally: …Just go look at their tutorial section, look at the artist names. “Learn about DDO and UE4 from Machinegame´s principal artist Tor Frick” “Learn how to create professional product visualisations wtih the SUITE 2 from The Mill’s Hugo Jackson” “Learn how to prepare assets for SUITE 2 from Ubisoft’s weapons artist Greg Rassam”
http://quixel.se/hub/learn/You can also wade through Quixel’s Twitter feed.
Not that it means anything to anyone here, but I bought it. I went ahead and got it when there was a discount a few months ago. I honestly haven’t had much time to spend with it and have been getting myself reaquainted with CG in general. But from what I’ve seen and the “little” bit of fooling with the program, I have to say, I like it… although admittedly I haven’t tried any of the competitors. I do like the fact that I get to work in PS though.
Apparently Part III of the tutorial will have their ideas for a basic Cycles shader setup.
Just in case there is anyone in here as thick as me, make sure that you use PNG or TGA for your maps. I wasn’t even paying attention and used the default straight out of Xnormal. Long story short, they don’t work with Quixel Suite. Spent waaaaaay too much time trying to figure out what I did wrong!
Also make sure the png has no alpha channel or else quixel will crash
