Megascans becomes free for use with Unreal Engine

That means that if you are using Megascans with UE4, you get free, unlimited, and instant access to all of Megascans through Bridge and Mixer, and a wealth of Megascans packs on the Unreal Engine Marketplace. Ten high-resolution packs have been shared today for free on the Unreal Engine Marketplace, with additional asset packs being made available for free on the Marketplace at a future date within the Unreal Engine 4.24 release timeframe. This way, you can access the content in whatever way you prefer.

If you’re using Megascans only with UE4, you will get refund all of your subscriptions for 2019. 

Megascans subscription prices lowered for everyone

Furthermore, Quixel is immediately slashing the pricing of Megascans, giving you nearly twice as much content to download, and removing the resolution cap—for everyone, regardless of what engine, DCC or renderer you love and rely on. We’re also giving you a refund for the remaining duration of your subscription period to allow you to hop onto one of our new plans. If you have an active subscription, log in to find out how to obtain a refund.

Bridge and Mixer 2020 will be 100% free for everyone

But that’s not all. Epic is helping us make the upcoming 2020 versions of Bridge and Mixer 100% free for everyone, with no subscription required and both fully featured. We are releasing these new free versions within a few weeks from now and I’m thrilled to finally be able to share with you the upcoming updates.

Bridge 2020

Bridge 2020 brings you a massively improved browsing experience, designed to save you as much time as humanly possible and to help inspire you creatively. Browsing has become much more visual, relevant, and fun. Nearly a hundred new collections have been added, the search bar is now much smarter, and powerful filtering has been introduced.

What’s more, we’ve implemented an AI search feature that finds all the assets in any image you feed it, essentially making environment planning much easier, whether you have real-world references or concept art.

Mixer 2020

At last, Mixer 2020 now introduces 3D Painting, Real-time 3D Curvature, Smart Materials and much, much more. This update also finally introduces 3D Blur, Grouping, Map-specific Blending, Advanced AO Mixing, Box Projection, Material ID Masking, 3D Position Gradients and 3D Normals to name a few, as another step on the path to making Mixer the ultimate, and now free, texturing app.

In short, you can now design Smart Materials, 3D paint meshes, and create tileable surfaces, all in one app. Quixel Mixer 2020 seamlessly fuses scan data, PBR painting and procedural authoring, for a vastly streamlined texturing experience, with native access to over 10,000 scans and new content rolling in every day. Whether you’re targeting organic, hard-surface, photoreal or stylized texturing, working in 3D or 2D, Mixer 2020 finally has you covered.

The new free Mixer and Bridge 2020 will be released later this year.

Unreal Studio features for all Unreal Engine users

As of upcoming Unreal Engine 4.24 release, the features of Unreal Studio are being rolled into Unreal Engine and will be made available to everyone for free. Unreal Studio, which has been in open beta since March 2018, is a suite of tools and services designed to augment Unreal Engine for architecture, manufacturing, and product design; however, its features have applicability across broader markets. The most notable Unreal Studio feature that will now become a standard feature in Unreal Engine is Datasmith, a workflow toolkit that enables you to efficiently aggregate and optimize 3ds Max, Revit, SketchUp Pro, Cinema 4D, and a wide range of CAD and BIM data in Unreal Engine.

Making Datasmith available to all Unreal Engine users brings high-fidelity, whole-scene conversion to the masses! In addition, the new Visual Dataprep makes automating data preparation workflows more accessible so smaller, design-focused teams can benefit from them. 

As part of this integration all Unreal Engine users will gain static mesh editing, basic UV projections, jacketing and defeaturing optimization tools, and a Variant Manager.

With the release of Unreal Engine 4.24, Unreal Studio will be retired. Users can continue to use existing versions, but they will no longer be supported or updated. Whether you are in games, architecture, automotive, film, television, live events, training and simulation, or any other industry, Unreal Engine is a single solution, with everyone benefitting from all features.

More Unreal Engine 4.24 Highlights

• New nondestructive, layer-based Landscape workflows enable more interesting and engaging outdoor environments where the terrain automatically adapts to other elements in the world. 
• The Sky Atmosphere component generates a physically accurate sky that can be updated dynamically depending on the time of day, and it can be viewed from the ground or from the air to create realistic-looking planetscapes. 
• The new experimental strand-based hair and fur system brings characters to life with realistic, flowing hair. 
• Screen-space global illumination allows for natural light-filled spaces using fewer resources.
• The Live Universal Scene Description (USD) Stage Actor creates a direct link to the USD file on disk for faster iteration and better collaboration. 
• Project creation workflow now includes a wizard-style workflow centered around the industry or type of project you are creating so you only see relevant settings and tools.

Twinmotion: extended free availability

Powered by Unreal Engine, Twinmotion is a highly intuitive, high-quality solution for fast and easy real-time visualization for architecture, construction, urban planning, and landscaping. Previously, epic Games announced that Twinmotion would remain free until November 2019; once downloaded, you can continue using the free version indefinitely. Today, we’re extending the free availability until our next release of Twinmotion, which is anticipated to ship in the first quarter of 2020. The new version will offer even greater photorealism, improved assets, tools to facilitate collaborative workflows, and more.