Quixel Helper Addon: Combines the best quality textures with speed.
Availability:
Gumroad: https://gumroad.com/l/QuixelHelper
Blender Market: https://blendermarket.com/products/quixel-helper-addon
The challenge
Quixel Bridge is a perfect asset browser that shows excellent previews. It has also filter options and categories. (if you don’t know Quixel Megascan: it offers the best quality textures on earth). The problem when we export material (surface) from Quixel Bridge to Blender, there is no or not a good mapping applied. So it takes a lot of time to prepare you materials before you can use them. Here a screenshot Quixel Bridge:
The Solution: Quixel Helper Addon
- With one button click you can add tri-planar mapping Quixel’s material. No need to UV-unwrap.
- You can scale the texture in the addon, so no need to go in the node-editor or properties panel and search for the mapping properties.
- If you still wish, you can also add UV-mapping with one button click.
What else the Quixel Bridge Addon offers:
- Three useful snap-presets to block out a scene a bit faster: Sticky snap, Edge snap and Increment Snap.
- Add better primitives (cube and cylinder) that has an origine at the bottom. Now you don’t need to go in Edit mode, make selection, cursor to selected, object mode origin to cursor. So now we can just add a primitive on the ground and scale it. Also very handy with Sticky Snap (surface).
- Camera tools. Now that we want to work as fast as possible, we will want to have the most used tools at hand: lock to view, unlock to view, passe-partout, add DOF with one click, and F-Stop.
- Color management: Choose Render-engine, Contrast, View Transform, Exposure.
Roadmap
There are loads of ideas for the Quixel Helper Addon, for example:
- Tools to speed up particle system.
- Tools for Decals
- AntiTile
- Random variations
At the moment I don’t know yet what is most important, but I will add more features coming months.
Documentation
Installation
The addon will install like most other addons; Download the .py file and in Blender you go to Edit > Preferences > Addons. Browse to the file you just downloaded, activate the addon (checkbox on left-top) and save preferences (left-bottom). You can find the addon in the N-Panel. And the name of the tab is: QXH
QuickStart
- In Quixel Bridge you export your asset (materials for now) to Blender.
- Assign the material to your object.
- Press Add Box mapping, and adjust the scale to your liking.
Note: Most of the time, the settings AO, Metallic, Normal, Specular is already good. But once in a while you need them to fix issues (like Quixel turned on the Metallic slider open when it shouldn’t.
Purge: remove all orphans. Click this until you see the message that there is nothing removed. When you delete something in your scene, it will still be there somewhere. And if you try a lot of textures from Quixel Bridge in one session, then it could add up eating RAM. So that’s why I put this button here.
Fix normalmap is only to fix the issue the Quixel exporter had when Blender added a new socket to the Principled Shader. It’s fixed by Quixel with a new update, so soon this button will be obsolete. I will keep it there though, in case you can’t get the update for Quixel Bridge.
Refresh Addon is for development purpose, but if there is something wrong, you could try to reload the addon with this.
Snapping: Tools for snapping. the sticky snap is also handy for the “better cube”, you can snap to surfaces. To see it’s effect hold Ctrl when dragging. Included also Snap to Edge, and Increment Snap.
Add Primitives: Adds a cube or cylinder, but then with the origin at the bottom face. This way you need less steps when scaling and snapping.
Camera: Settings for camera. Most are pretty straight forward. To use the Add DOF button, first place your 3D cursor where you want to focus on (sharp). Then just click the button and use the slider “F-Stop”.
Color Management: Set the render engine, Contrast, View Transform and Exposure.
A Video tutorial will follow later
