Digital Environment Library with Quixel (very WIP)

[Kardonn]

Been working on a few HDAs to handle the automation of dropping in and rendering assets from Quixel's upcoming Megascans library.

Some of the tools that I've made so far:

[Quixel Shader] has four main attributes, $root_dir, $mtl_dir, $mtl_name, and mode. Modes are either hard surface, simple foliage, or complex foliage. There's also other attributes that allow you to color correct and manipulate things like diffuse, roughness, normal map strength, displacement height, etc.

All of the materials are set up so that $root_dir = "Z:/Lib/Quixel/Atlases", then $mtl_dir would be something like "Plant_Vines_pgllK2_4K_atlas_ms" and then (huge assumption time...) $mtl_name is just the $mtl_dir[-18:-13], so "pgllK" in this example.

Under the hood, the shader will use that combined string to find the Albedo, Specularity, Roughness, Normals, and Displacement paths. If the shader mode is set to simple foliage, it also uses the Opacity texture along with backlight enabled in the shader. If it's set to complex foliage, it uses Opacity, and then does a second shader call to handle backlighting with a separate Translucency map. Looks better but longer renders, so I keep it optional.

[Quixel Asset] uses those same ideas, except it's pulling in a .obj file (I write these out as .abc later don't worry), and attaching [Quixel Shader] that lives inside the asset. All the paths get hooked up based on the asset's path. On the /obj/ level of the asset, you can also turn on SSS and set the depth in mm. Some of the assets are things like mushrooms, so it's nice for that.

End result is that with a single use of the tab button and a quick copy and paste of folder names, you've got an entire asset ready to go.

The foliage is a different story, and I painstakingly have to create polygon geometry for every leaf in each sheet of scanned foliage I want to use. Can't really automate that...at least not at my skill level anyway. There's a little procedural help doing things like using that foliage sheet's Displacement.exr to displace the points a bit and add some detail. For the most part it's a lot of manual work though.

[Plant Stems] Feed in your scattered ground cover points, your ground geo and VDB collision proxy, and it'll just trail + sweep a POP sim with a bit of noise and create proper UVs. That way your little leafs are anchored to the ground and shaded nicely. This is by far the laziest part of the setup and it needs some love to get richer results.

Here's a very rough layout to demo some of this stuff.

And who here doesn't like seeing a render now and then.

 

Hope to show more as I go!

[Kardonn]

Another quick test image here with some more foliage models I just finished prepping. ~70 different moss filaments (or whatever they're called) that looks extremely convincing even pretty close up. From farther back it's really very pretty.

 

[Hamp]

Really nice stuff! Any idea on when megascans will be available?

[Kardonn]

I think early 2015 last time I checked!

But in seriousness I'm not totally sure yet on the new planned timing.

[Hamp]

Thanks! Waiting then.... 

[Federico]

I'm waiting for megascan since 2014, right now there are more chances to see half life 3 than megascan.

 

[Kardonn]

Megascans is publicly available now for anyone who hasn't seen the announcement yet.

[ciliath]

Hey Kardonn,

Really cool renders you got going on there.

I was wondering if you could shed some light on your texture workflow for bringing in the megascans assets.
Like what textures do you hook up to your material and what intensity values you use on those?

I started playing with the free megascans assets today, and would really enjoy understanding It more

Thanks!

[localstarlight]

Hey Kardonn,

Awesome work!

Any plans to release your HDAs for the Megascans workflow?