Quixel Megascans and Substance Painter into VR using BrioVR

Quixel Megascans and Substance Painter into VR using BrioVR

The creation of compelling interactive scenes in VR can be a time consuming task. Fortunately, this process can be streamlined by using assets available from the Quixel Megascans library and some quick sculpts of rocks from Zbrush which are then textured in Allegorithmic’s Substance Painter.

This tutorial gives you detailed explanation of how to create a beautiful and inspiring scene using Quixel Megascans and assets from Substance Painter, then imported into BrioVR to view the scene in VR with very less effort. Briovr lets you build interactive VR scenes and then share them across multiple platforms. SpinVFX in Toronto shared their workflow. The steps involved in this process are:

1. Download the scanned assets from Megascans library and then import the assets into Autodesk Maya. I have also imported some rock sculpts from zbrush, textured in substance painter into Maya to assemble them to create a quick layout of the gallery.

Megascans Rock materials

Megascans Rock materials

Constructed the scene in Maya. There are few rocks, a light and a ground floor. I wanted to view it in VR so I made a placeholder man in the scene to get the scale correct. You can also do this In Briovr.

Some retouching done in Substance Painter to make the light and shadow look more juicy.

2. I grouped the assets based on the same shading groups and then scaled each asset groups uniformly to 0.01, as all the assets were in real world scale.

3)Exported each group from Maya as .obj.

4. There are handful of apps and softwares I can use to view my scene in VR. For one I really like is Unreal because of its great render quality and shaders. However, it’s difficult to share my simple scene with other people and the process can be tedious. WIth Brio I can also drag in Video, Audio and Interactivity without getting stuck in the technical weeds. Also to save the trouble of exporting an exe, I choose to use Brio, which is an online interactive builder for VR.

5. After I drag the models into Brio’s builder, I upload all the maps like diffuse, normal, roughness, metallic, etc to all the asset groups in the scene by selecting the asset group either in the scene or in the Object List and can control various parameters of each maps using the sliders. If you have lightmaps for some of the assets it can enhance the look of the assets. I did apply lightmaps for the Cubic lights hanging above the tree.

6. Here comes the most important part — lighting. Lights make the scene more lively and pretty. For the lighting, I used the built-in point light from the environment menu. I changed some parameters to get the warm tone which I intended to do in my scene. Also you can change the background by either using HDRs in the environment library or selecting a background color.

7. Now to add that sweet icing on the cake to the scene, I used the post process effects available in the filters in the environment tab. I used both height and depth fog in my scene.

8. I wanted the camera to fly around the scene so I used Brio Waypoints which have various cool features where you can teleport, bounce or slide in between respective waypoints and can also assign delay along or change the type of the curve.

10. I also dragged a Navmesh behaviour on my rocks so that the player can teleport in the scene using the touchpad on the Vive controller or by using joystick on the oculus rift controller.

The result looks pretty good. Here is a link to the actual scene:

https://view.briovr.com/8cda9d55-9d68-405a-ab06-76895b21b51e

Feel free to check it out yourself. Pleasure to share our experience.

Made another scene with one of my rocks

https://view.briovr.com/fb405bef-41be-41cf-8882-7fd18019a710