Answered: Mixer good for end to end texture creation

davide445

Wanting to create a realistic archviz of an existing building, I want to map his true materials.

Having no experience in texturing I approached Quixel Mixer, but what I didn't understand is if Mixer can start from the photo or photos I can shot at various building materials (steel, aluminum mostly, no scan is possible due the building size) and use Mixer to generate the whole needed elements (normal, AO, displacement etc).

Was looking at Materialize tutorials and understood can do that, wanting to understand the differences and where to start.

Synaesthesia

You'd create a set of tileable textures to work with - it would be difficult and largely pointless to create an entire building in Mixer as there's not enough texture resolution to properly display a building with only 4k or 8k pixels to work with. I would recommend looking up tutorials on how to use tileables to create building exteriors.

davide445

Thanks @Synaesthesia, my doubts is mostly if Mixer does have all is needed, starting from pictures of real world materials, to create tilable textures for game engines.
I.e I see normal map creation as experimental, but no AO or transparent, displacement etc. 
Need I to create them in another tool such as Photoshop 
Edit: researching more apear you can import your custom textures https://youtu.be/qFKwD1_cwtU
But Mixer didn't help you generating them from a photo. 
Any suggested tool do do this, that seamlessy integrate with Mixer? 

davide445

Digging more understood texturing from photo is becoming a commodity, with free tools available such as Materialize, ModLab and also low cost one.
So I suppose I can use these to prepare my custom texture and next use Mixer to enrich it with all the layers, controls and Megascan materials and decals database to pick up from. 

Synaesthesia

You can create materials from photos using Mixer currently. Try adding a mask stack to a layer and then use the three-lined menu right above the mask stack to use the Smart Mask/Material system.