Quixel has announced that Mixer, its PBR texture editing software, is now available free of charge during its beta period – expected to last at least a year. Mixer allows the user to create PBR materials by combining scanned textures, but has grown more powerful recently as it evolves into a more general purpose texturing tool. In a recent blog post, Quixel describes the intention behind the development of Mixer to create a standalone home for their Photoshop plugins NDO and DDO, that latter of which was considered at one point a competitor to Substance Painter.
Until now, Mixer has been available only as part of a Megascans subscription, but Quixel has also announced that once the free beta period is over it will be available under a perpetual licensing scheme for $99. It will also continue as part of a Megascans subscription.
Read more about this announcement in a post by Quixel’s CEO Teddy Bergsman on Quixel’s Blog.
This is great news, I guess. I’m just more interested in finally seeing the NDO/DDO Mixer integration. They dropped the ball by clinging on to PS for so long. If we get the NDO/DDO within the free trial period, it would mean serious competition for Painter.
The way they run their business,though. They’re looking like another Allegorithmic waiting to happen.
“…but Quixel has also announced that once the free beta period is over it will be available under a perpetual licensing scheme for $99.” wow! amazing news! <3 these are good news!
This is great news, in fact, at the begining I liked Quixel more than Substance, but I hated that it was INSIDE Photoshop, having this as an standalone package, with a big material library (wich I´m not sure if it has it) adn that price… I will go for Quixel without a doubt 🙂
O hope they lower a bit the material library subscription cost because it´s a bit too expensive IMO, but anyways, great news 🙂
Why is paying a subscription for a material library ok for you. But paying subscription for a software isn’t?
Because when my substance subscription ends I keep the materials I gathered (and the software BTW) and I can keep using them, and when an Autodesk subscription ends you keep nothing… and if you want to re-use your work in any manner you have to keep paying Autodesk.
In fact the substance subscription allows that, but I think the Quixel subscription does not allow that, and this is another thing that will have to change in order to use it in our pipeline.
Cheers!
c’mon, you have to give a REAL alternative to substance designer/painter,
right now is not, but you could do it
You are right. sadly some people are jumping quickly on the marketing and go “oh Substance Painter alternative” without even trying the software, when it is nothing special, not even close to anything special.
People talk about how nice is getting away from Adobe, but actually, that shows how they don’t have the will or the intelligence or skills to create their own technology, because now the program is made on top of unity.
And that’s not even the problem, but if you think about it, Quixel has NEVER done anything about painting, brushes, realistic fealing of them, ‘lazy mouse’, curves, symmetry or anything. All they advertised for Quixel Suite was how you could use any Photoshop tool and that’s it.
So you open Mixer and it is so mediocre and simple, it seems it will always be a nice way of mixing materials and nothing else. what else can you use this for? But in the end Quixel is all about Megascans and I guess that’s all that matters.
Even ArmorPaint seems like has a better future, but I don’t like they are charging for the binary and they are building it with too much Blender in mind.
The only real alternative for now to Painter and painting on 3D is 3DCoat, which has feature that not even Painter had for the nature of Painter’s technology. But even with all those tools the real strength about Substance Painter was Substance Designer, but to be honest while Designer is cool and it’s nice to do some work on it, I never really cared about it much, Daniel Thiger stuff, while cool, it is pretty useless for most things, since it would take to long for what it’s worth, nice technology but I mean it’s just not useful. and if you think about it, it makes more sense to use native node work than use substance designer, for example, what Epic games did with Paragon and how they only used Painter to paint masks and they used native Unreal node material to do the rest.
But Quixel Mixer seems like just a tiny little tool for little small things like mixing materials for environment artists and that’s it, nothing compared to 3DCoat, Painter, not even Zbrush or Mudbox even if they don’t support PBR workflow. And I don’t see it’s something super special that Unreal and Unity can’t do natively or someone else with a plugin for them.
But you forget what IMHO is the real strength of Substace… the material library, it is so big and up to some point, procedural, that is hard to compete with that.
Regarding the software, I agree, 3D Coat is the only real alternative right now, but this may be a good impulse so Quixel revamps Mixer and reduces their library price.
As they themselves said, Quixel has been pretty near to die, and I think if they take this as an impulse, lower the price barrier and conditions, they could replace Painter, but 3D Coat is doing a great race! hehehe
Interesting times!
the material library?
really?
I do a lot of painter/designer and I avoid the material library as much as I can,
I do my own materials inside painter/designer.
Their material library could be gone and I wouldn’t even notice.
well, we use it in different ways.
For you 3D Coat could be a perfect alternative.
We use the material library A LOT, for fast and small projects it´s a great way to have good materials in no time, it all depends on your needs 🙂
Cheers!
Sure, as things stand Mixer isn’t a real alternative to Painter (3dCoat, ArmorPaint, Mari maybe, I haven’t tried them). Its a nice tool for mixing textures though and I think it has potential to move into Painters territory if Quixel make the right moves – but it might take years. Even if it does take years I can’t see my allergy to renting from Adobe having a big impact on my use of Substance for the foreseeable future. I’m planning to keep using my substance perpetual until it no longer makes sense.. and at the same time keeping my eyes open for alternatives to renting anything from Adobe (or anyone else).