Texturing in Mixer

The Quixel Mixer to Bridge to Unreal workflow is insanely easy, and useful for quick tests.

It's pretty GPU heavy when using lots of layers, especially if it's creating displacement map on every layer. The painting tool is heavily effected by the same issues, so toggling layers can speed up worktimes. I mostly only had these slowdown using my home PC though, the more powerful GPUs at BPC were much improved.

One of the issues I had is that the photoscan meshes were of hugely inconsistent sizes, and without a physical measurement reference on site, the size is just an approximate guess.

Mixer has a incredible useful scale import with a XYZ measurement in metres of your imported model, this lets you correct any inconsistencies with model sizes earlier in the workflow. It also means that you could import models at different scales to be textured differently (Small pebbles/large rock)

Mixer is a layer based additive material creator. I've screenshotted below 5 of the layers I added to a simple rock project.

Using a mixture of height blending, opacity, and mask stacks, it's relatively straight forward to start creating complex textures that don't look repetitive to the eye.

Using paint masks you can add localised details like mossy rock where it meets the ground, and more sunbleached staining on the top.

Being able to directly paint onto any of the maps is also a great way to add more detail.

The seams of the UV map are a big factor to consider early in the workflow however. Having well placed seams can help alleviate any harsh borders when using noise masks on layers.

Another useful feature of Mixer is that it generates a whole suite of material maps for use in Unreal Engine.

Something to keep in mind is that only 4096px (and smaller) maps are supported properly at the moment. The 8192px resolutions are in beta and increases the slowdown significantly.