Nearing the end of 2019, Epic Games announced they had acquired texture provider Quixel and as part of that announcement, released 10,000+ high quality textures from the Megascans completely free for Unreal Engine users. Around the same time, Epic also announced the archviz product TwinMotion would be integrated into Unreal Engine 4.24. Today, they took that one step further and released 1,000+ high quality textures from TwinMotion completely free for Unreal Engine users.
Details from the Unreal Engine blog:
Since Epic Games acquired Twinmotion last year and made the high-quality, easy-to-use real-time visualization solution freely available to the general public, we immediately started thinking about how we could best make it interoperable with Unreal Engine. While we’re excited to reveal more on how we’ll be integrating the two workflows together in the future, we wanted to begin bridging that gap today by offering Unreal users a free material collection that’s based on Twinmotion materials. There’s a wide variety of categories here including:
- Bricks
- Concrete
- Fabrics
- Glass
- Grass and dirt
- Wood
- Plastics
Available now on the Marketplace, we’ve ensured that these rich and powerful master materials support the latest ray-tracing advancements and have used best practices to define how the nearly 500 PBR materials were used. This work includes:
- Specific optimizations for ray tracing
- Advanced shading techniques, such as parallax occlusion mapping for materials needing relief, which is useful for surfaces like bricks
- Ability to use an object’s UVs or to use tri-planar mapping, which can assist texture alignment by automatically aligning textures on objects that might not have been given proper UV coordinates
- Ability to define real-world scale
The materials are available in a large 8GB+ download on the Unreal Engine Marketplace. You need to be running the most current version of Unreal Engine (4.24.2+ ) for the assets to work properly and expect the importation process to take a fair bit of time, as over 4000 shaders need to be built. If you want to check it out but skip the long download and importation process, you can see the new materials in action in the video below.