Introduction the Bridge interface

- [Instructor] Quixel Bridge provides simple and easy to use interface. Let us quickly explore the Quixel Bridge interface. On the main screen, you will see this banner which keeps on changing when new collection or items are introduced into the megascan library. If I scroll down, you'll find some random new surfaces and 3D models since the library, megascan library is updated pretty frequently. The new surfaces and 3D models are added as well and they're always labeled as new. Currently, there are about 12,737 assets in the megascan library and they keep on increasing. On my left side, we have different categories. So all these assets are properly organized in different categories. If I go to 3D assets, you will see that there are further categories within the 3D assets. It means that all the 3D models are organized really well. So for example, if I want to look for some rocks, I will go to the rock category and there are tons of rocks available here. Similarly, there are some 3D plants as well. If I click on the 3D plants, you will see that the plants are also organized in a very nice manner in different categories. And this makes the search really easy for us as well. The surfaces are what we call materials or textures usually in other 3D applications, we call them surfaces here, and these are all PBR ready to use textures. You can use them just by dragging and dropping it in your scene. So we will be using quite good amount of assets in this course. Now, the next thing is the collections. To understand the collection, what I'm going to do, is I'll show you the search capability. I can search anything here that I want to look into the library. Now, for example, I have a tropical beach scene that I want to create and I need some rocks for my beach. What I'm going to do is I'll just simply type in rock and hit enter, and it's going to search all the rocks available in the library. Now I can scroll through the rocks and look for something that is appropriate with a beach scene, but it's going to take a lot of time to go through the tons of the rocks that are currently available. Now, in order to make the search really simple for myself, I'll go to the collections. Now, this is a very wise way of narrowing down my search. I will look into different categories here and I have a category which says, tropical beach. I can go to it, and anything that is related to creation of a tropical beach has been put in this pack or in this collection. Now I can find some really nice rocks and surfaces and other stuff that could collectively create a really nice, good looking, realistic beach scene for me. Similarly, there are lots of other collection as well, including the decorative, and there are some stuff for the architectural visualization as well. Take your time and go through all these collections. So you should have an idea what amazing stuff this library has. Then we have a free assets category here, the purchased one. If you have purchased any assets online, you will see them here and the favorite category. Now let me quickly explain the favorite. While browsing through the assets, what you can do is, you can make certain assets as favorite. For example, this is an asset, and I believe that I may use this asset later. So I'll set this one as favorite by clicking this heart icon over here. And let's say, I'm going to make this one favorite as well. So if I go to my favorites category or see these assets being added to favorite, thus making my search capability really easy. In the local group, everything that I have downloaded so far, and that is currently on my hard drive, it's being saved in the local category. And again, it's been organized very well in different categories. If you notice these have a tick mark over here, this means that these assets are already downloaded, unlike the other assets that we just saw on the main screen. So these are not downloaded yet. Now let's just quickly see a couple of more things. If I click on this surface over here it's going to show me a preview on this site along with the asset information which tells you that this is a fully tileable material and other information, any similar or relevant assets to this asset are also shown. So you can browse and download those if you need to. Here, it's basically a 2D view of the surface that I have, but I can see the maps as well that this surface contains. From maps I mean, I can see the albedo, ambient occlusion, displacement, normal, and roughness map for this particular surface. I can also view 3D models by clicking on any of the 3D model here. And then I can change the view to 3D by simply clicking on this 3D view icon over here. It's going to take a couple of seconds and it will load the 3D model. By left clicking in the view, holding the left mouse button, I can rotate and see my model in real time in 3D view as you can see here. It also offers you to check different maps on your 3D model, such as it's currently PBR, but I can change it to albedo. If I want to check just the albedo map on my 3D model or let's say the immune occlusion and cavity map. So I'm going to change that back to PBR. Now notice that when I choose this 3D model, I have the scale parameter as well. This shows me how small the statue is in reference to a normal human body. And if I click on this 3D model, you will see that this is the scale reference of this 3D model in respect to a human body. Plus there is something which says closed. Now it means that this model is closed from all sides. If I go to the rock category once again, and I click on this rock, you will see that it says that this is open it's because the model is open from the backside. And let me just rotate this model and you'll see that it's open from the backside. The scale is also shown here, so it's really huge with respect to a human body. Now, I can always go ahead and download any asset by clicking the download button, but before downloading, I will go to the download settings and I can set the texture resolution. Currently, it's 2K, but I can download this asset up to 8K resolution. I can download the material preset. If I want to download it for unreal engine, I will simply click it unreal. And it's going to set all the maps required for unreal with this preset. I can choose the mesh format if I want to download it as FBX, OBJ or ABC. Plus I can also download different level of details for my 3D models. And I can download a highpoly source, which I want to change, for example, in Zbrush or any other 3D application. I can download the brushes that I can use in sculpting application. There is this source Ztool, which you can use in Zbrush as well. Plus there are the maps that will be downloaded with this 3D model. So if you need other maps such as cavity gloss, you can go ahead and check those, and then once you're done with this, you can just simply hit the download button to download the assets. Now, these are the basics of the interface of Quixel Bridge. Next we're going to link Quixel Bridge to unreal engine and we'll export a couple of 3D assets and test them inside unreal engine.