Megascans Mixer Primer

Get started with creating your own materials, using Megascans surfaces, atlases and custom painted textures

Mixer has a clean and intuitive interface that belies the power on offer. Not only does it allow you to stack various Megascans surfaces on top of each other, with fine-tuning for placement and blending, but it also enables you to customise attributes of those surfaces, such as colour and specularity. On top of that it provides tools that let you handpaint masks and material layers, so you can easily add depth to a material. In this example we’ll show you how to create an old road surface, using a combination of some saved Megascans surfaces, an atlas and some hand-painted masking, using a custom brush, as well as the awesome fluid layer to add puddles in the recesses.

BOOT up 01

When you launch Mixer you’ll be presented with the file manager, where you can load previous mixes or create a new project. A nice feature is that you can set projects, meaning organising files for specific scenes is a doddle. When you create a new mix a popup opens, where you can specify a name, the output resolution of your textures and material type, which will be specular for us (you can change this later if needed).

ADD A SURFACE LAYER 02

Most of the work will be done with the Layers and Attributes panels. Start off by adding a surface layer. The buttons for adding different layer types run across the top of the layer, so find the surface one and Mixer will then open up the library, where you can find locally saved items or browse the online library. Choose a rough, dirty base layer and Mixer will set it up for you.

TWEAK THE SURFACE 03

Now it’s time to get the base layer exactly how you want it. You can adjust the colour, tiling and rotation as well as larger and smaller detail values. Don’t worry about big displacement values interfering with higher layers. There are controls to avoid that later. Once you are happy with your adjustments

hit the button to add a new surface and choose your main surface, in this case an asphalt. This is where you can use the Remove Base Details option to avoid any harshness showing from below.

Dig DEEP 04

With the asphalt layer active you can now hit the Paint Mask button at the bottom of the Layers palette. This will open up the brush panel on the left, where you can choose from presets or load up alphas of your own. We chose to paint an area of depression so that there is somewhere for old water to settle, as we really love the Mixer fluid layer. Painting masks is simple but fun, as the displacement happens in real time, so it’s almost like sculpting. There’s an eraser button too, so if you overdo it, you can easily rectify the situation.

final DETAILS 05

We wanted to add a little more detail, so clicked the ‘add atlas’ layer and chose a yellow line, which is masked out to avoid overlapping edges (turn on tiling to see), plus a drain cover for some metal detail. What really transforms this is by adding a fluid layer and using the threshold control to assign a water level. You can adjust how wet the surrounding areas are, as well as the colour and depth. View different light setups to get a feel for it (the Environment dropdown is at the top right of the viewport).

EXPORT YOUR TEXTURES 06

At the top right of the UI you will see the Export tab. Here you can assign which maps you want to create, a final export resolution in case you want to adjust it, and define the naming conventions, should you wish to output multiple versions. Now all that is left is to choose a file path and click export. The rendering process is quick and once done you can load into your favourite 3D content creation app, loading the textures into a material slot. For this example we used Octane in Cinema 4D.