Quixel Mixer

What is Quixel Mixer?

Quixel Mixer was Epic Games' free material creation tool, built around the Megascans library of photoreal scanned surfaces. You could pull scanned brick, moss, mud and metal from Megascans, layer them onto a model, and paint masks to blend between them, all with a real-time PBR preview.

The tool was a fan favorite in the Unreal Engine community because it was completely free and made high-end scanned materials approachable. Environment artists used it to dress terrain and props with believable detail without spending days in a texture editor.

There is an important catch for anyone reading this today: in late 2024 Epic Games announced the sunset of Quixel Bridge and Quixel Mixer, with the Megascans library moving to the Fab marketplace. Mixer is no longer being developed, so treat this page as a record of a beloved tool rather than a recommendation to start new projects on it.

Key Features

• Direct painting of materials onto 3D models in the viewport
• Layer-based material mixing with masks, brushes and generators
• Deep integration with the Megascans scanned asset library
• Real-time PBR preview with adjustable lighting
• One click export to Unreal Engine and other platforms
• Vertex painting and geometric paint for precise placement
• Free to use with an Epic Games account

How to get started

Mixer was downloaded from the Quixel website and signed in with a free Epic Games account, which also unlocked the Megascans library. The workflow was simple: import or paint a base material, drag in Megascans layers, and paint masks to blend them together.

Since the tool has been sunset, the practical path now is to browse the Megascans library on Fab and use it in Unreal Engine directly, or switch to an actively developed texturing tool for new work.

• Sign in with an Epic Games account to access Megascans
• Import your model or start with a simple shape
• Add scanned materials as layers
• Paint masks and use generators to blend between materials
• Export the final PBR maps for your engine

Use cases

• Texturing game environments with photoreal scanned surfaces
• Adding moss, dirt and wear to props and terrain
• Quick material iteration for Unreal Engine projects
• Creating tileable material variations for indie games
• Learning PBR material mixing without spending money

Pricing and licensing

Quixel Mixer was freeware: no subscription, no watermark, just an Epic Games account. The Megascans library was also free to use in Unreal Engine projects, which made Quixel the default choice for many indie teams.

That era has ended. Epic retired the Quixel tools and migrated the Megascans library to the Fab marketplace, where asset licensing is handled per asset. Check Fab for the current availability and terms of the scanned library.

Pros and cons

In its prime, Mixer offered a spectacular combination of price and quality: scanned photoreal materials, real-time painting, and zero cost. It lowered the barrier to professional-looking environment art more than almost any other tool of its time.

The major con is status: the tool is no longer developed or supported, so new users should look elsewhere. The underlying Megascans content lives on in Fab, but the painting and mixing workflow itself has no direct successor from Epic.

Alternatives

• Substance 3D Painter: the industry standard for painting PBR textures on models
• ArmorLab: open source AI-assisted PBR texture authoring
• Materialize: free tool that builds full PBR map sets from one image
• Poly: generates seamless PBR texture sets from a text prompt
• Blender: free and open source painting and procedural texturing