Quixel Mixer is now FREE during open beta!

Synaesthesia · Jan 2019

Image: https://i.imgur.com/ehkjLZH.png?1

That's right!

World-class texture generation is now at your fingertips, absolutely free during open beta. The toolset is being updated constantly and we'll be unveiling procedural texturing and model painting in upcoming builds, making Mixer a true replacement to the Quixel Suite, and a remarkable addition to any artist's toolkit. We believe that artistry should be accessible to all!

Look out for more updates to the tool as time goes on. There's so much more to unveil in upcoming builds. Looking forward to seeing all the sweet stuff you guys are going to create!

defragger · Feb 2019

can you share a roadmap where Quixel Mixer is going?

fdfxd2 · Feb 2019

Great timing

AlexG_WoLD · Feb 2019

Thanks guys! Spent few hours with it today and last night. Very impressed!

Is it possible to import your mesh (fbx or obj) to paint on like in DDO/NDO?

Not sure if I can't find it or the feature isn't implemented yet.

And where is the best place to drop suggestions and see what features are being worked on and included next?

Synaesthesia · Feb 2019

Hi Alex!

As I mentioned in the topic, we'll be unveiling procedural texturing and model painting in upcoming builds.

It's not a full game art toolset just yet, but we're definitely moving in that direction as fast as our little legs can carry us. Feel free to drop suggestions in a thread here, send me a PM on the forum, or join our Discord and use #requests-feedback to relay your ideas.

@defragger I don't have a handy website link to toss your way, so I'll make a quick writeup:

Mixer is, by summer, looking to become a fully procedural layer-based texture creation tool. Our internal development build already contains these features and quite a few of the recent art coming out of the company is created using a mix of procedural layer masking and Megascans data. In some cases, it's just procedural texturing entirely. We're aiming to make it as easy as possible to work in the tool and aren't keen on requiring a ton of technical knowledge to create materials, so we're trying to keep the learning curve as low as possible while not sacrificing any features or functionality in the process.

By the end of the year I imagine we'll start demonstrating model painting. We had a build a while ago that showed off some of the most basic features you'd expect for a texturing toolset inside of Mixer, so at this point it's really a refinement process to get these features ready for showtime.

CommonOne · Feb 2019

Hi,

Is mixer more like Substance Painter or Designer ... or maybe neither? Not a fan of Adobe CC so kind of looking for an alternative.

Synaesthesia · Feb 2019

It's focused on creating materials currently, so any competitor toolset that focuses on material development will be what it's most similar to. I would argue that it's very much like Photoshop for material creation.

CommonOne · Feb 2019

Thanks! So Quixel does not have a 3D painting app?

Synaesthesia · Feb 2019

DDO and NDO are both 3D painting tools that we currently offer, but will be discontinuing soon.

fdfxd2 · Feb 2019

Synaesthesia said:

DDO and NDO are both 3D painting tools that we currently offer, but will be discontinuing soon.

Discontinuing? Why?

Synaesthesia · Feb 2019

@teddybergsman's words on the subject should help clear things up here!

Hey guys! Teddy here, the creator of Suite 2 (NDO, DDO, 3DO) and all the tools that came before it (nDo2, dDo legacy, Suite). I spent a good chunk of my life, 7 years or so, developing these tools as I truly wanted to fight for that artists should never have to compromise between simplicity, creativity, fun and quality. Back at the time, Photoshop was the tool pretty much the entire industry used for texturing, despite it not really being built for it, and so I wanted to make the process of creating normal maps and textures simpler for artists.

It was the biggest challenge of my life. I rarely slept and didn’t go outside for months at a time, but finally, after many years, something started forming that would eventually become helpful to fellow artists. I pushed and pushed and pushed to make it faster, more feature rich and more stable. It eventually started becoming increasingly difficult to take it further, due to the limitations of it being a stand-alone application communicating with Photoshop. It was also incredibly hard to maintain, as every new update of Photoshop seemed to break Suite in more and more severe ways. And so a few colleagues and I set out to create Suite 3, a rewritten application from the ground up, fully integrated right inside of Photoshop, working as any other Photoshop panel.

This showed promise initially, while still quite the challenge, however soon we started bumping into some major roadblocks with how Photoshop’s new panel system was engineered. We tried every thinkable workaround to no avail. We tried to reach out to every corner of Adobe over several years, without ever getting a single reply back from anyone.

Development of the Ps tools started to slow down about 3 years ago as a result, and we’re still struggling to find workarounds or anyone at Adobe that would like to talk to us. Suite 2 development has suffered severely as a result, and it came to a point where I thought it was no longer OK for us to feature it prominently on the Quixel site, since we had shifted almost all efforts to getting Suite 3 to work (I had planned on making an announcement regarding this as soon as I can in the new year, explaining why, but giving some more detailed background in this post first).

Meanwhile, we finally were able to release Megascans, Bridge and Studio, which at more than one point seemed almost impossible, and we nearly went under a few times in the process because of the incredibly difficult undertaking. It had been in development since the very start of Quixel 8 years ago (however I have personally worked on the underlying technologies for more than half my life). But finally it was released. It became appreciated, and started to become adopted by artists, prior customers and new alike. Quixel grew as a company, and eventually I have become the manager of over 100 employees, all with the shared vision that has been maintained since the beginning: create tools that never compromise between simplicity, creativity, fun and quality, and create positive change for artists. This is reflected in every choice we ever make as a company, in every scan that we craft, and in every tool that we engineer. (edited)

About 2 years ago, we made a plan to slowly but surely bring all of the concepts to life that we were originally bringing to Suite 3, into a new stand alone application. We had almost run out of money as a company, but started a small team of 2 developers, led by myself, to being work on an application that would let you do all of the things you could do in NDO, DDO and 3DO, but in a faster, more robust, and more creative format. This app is Mixer. We’re still far from there, and you only see a few basic concepts revealed yet (creating an application from scratch is a bit more time consuming than creating plugins for Photoshop, it turns out). If you look closely enough however, you will see that the painting and PBR rendering engine we have implemented is straight from 3DO — the first small hint of what is to come, and that Suite lives on through Mixer. As Megascans has grown in popularity, we have also been able to grow the Mixer team to 6 developers in total, and Wiktor Öhman is now working closely with us to ensure every single feature looks and feels the way it should. Over time, you will see Mixer transform into something more than for just blending textures. I really hope you will enjoy what we have planned for you guys.

As someone who has used Photoshop since the age of 9 (I’m 32 now) and has spent the better part of my adult life trying to realise my vision through Photoshop, I’m obviously inclined to keep trying to make Suite 3 work despite what seems to be another near-impossible task, but that being said, I am also incredibly excited about the future of Mixer, and the fact that I’m no longer alone but joined by a team of engineer and artists that are more knowledgable than I ever was, and the fact that as we speak, we are realising concepts that I have been dreaming about for over a decade that simply would note be possible inside of Photoshop. So what I’m trying to say I guess, is that we are very much working as hard as we can to bring you what we hope will be an incredibly fun, easy-to-use and creative set of tools, to help you get more time to explore your creative potential. I will draft an official message after the new year to make these thoughts public, but I thought you should hear it here from me first. Thanks guys.

defragger · Feb 2019

sounds good to me!

Don't really need the ability to mix textures but I'm looking forward to the actual painting part.

Goshi · Mar 2019

hey, that´s a really good move! 1st having a beta, that works without an active megascan account and second you guys are finally moving away from Adobe PS. It´s not, that I disliked the Suite tool in PS, it was working very good - but it was just too slow.

Mixer works like a charm and I hope, you can bring back the functionallity of the suite into mixer at some point. It´s subjective, I know - but I allways feel like Suite and real life scans give me a more artistic, less artificially result, than the substance toolset does - which I also like as well.

would be sweet, if mixer would be able to generate a material from photos. your scans are great, but I´d like to bring in some local ground textures and so on, mix that with some of your scans to get new results.

Quixel Mixer is now FREE during open beta!

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