Fab, Megascans, UE etc.

Ok. Good to know. So, we can just claim those “scans” in Fab next month. I’m still not sure it’s a correct move to deny free starting assets for newcomers next year. I’m just started to switch 2 weeks or so ago. The next wave will find it harder to adopt the engine. But that’s for Unreal-specific projects, I totally understand charging film production / other engine usage.

Now, I’d only like to know if the ownership will be transfered too UE Marketplace > Fab Ownership Transfer

These free assets are still under Epic’s LA which prohibits such thing as far as I understand.

It’s not about the free assets, but the free licence provided, like Personal and Indie. Since Indie is now free, that should means we can use them everywhere, but they don’t clearly say if it’s possible, or not.

quoting the Blogpost:

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/fab-content-marketplace-launches-in-october-publishing-portal-opens-today

2 Likes

I really hope that Fab replacement for both external and integrated Bridge will finally work correctly. Both integrated and external bride apps are atrociously slow to the point of being straight up unusable sometimes. Previously, it could be waved away be saying “but it’s free”.

Now that the content will no longer be free starting 2025, there will be no more excuses to have such insanely low quality standards for the performance of the asset distribution platform. It would be embarrassing to ask people for money in a store app that is not capable for rasterizing a few dozen of 2D UI elements on CPUs with dozens of threads and GPUs with thousands of cores at framerate numbers higher than what you can count on fingers of one hand.

If the content is commercial, the platform’s technical execution should be up to the commercial standards.

On the one hand, I expect this, on the other hand, given that even after all the years, Epic still hasn’t managed to get their stuff together in terms of the launcher UX and performance, I am very skeptical.

Ultimately, I will vote with my wallet. I will be more than happy to support future content creation by paying money for the existing one. But I won’t buy anything if I, as a customer, get disrespected by the developers of the distribution platform and its integration into the engine not putting at least bare minimum expected effort into its UX and performance (which is part of the UX on its own).

2 Likes

Is there any information about how these changes apply to educators, students and schools?

I teach some Unreal Engine courses and the free Megascans library has allowed me to teach the class without requiring the school or student to purchase assets (we don’t have the set up or time to teach modeling and texture workflows). I teach at a private arts high school, so resources are not as abundant.

My questions and concerns…

  1. Will there be a different pricing structure for educators and students to allow them to access the Quixel Megascans library?

  2. If an institution, like my school, is required to purchase asset packs, will we be allowed to distribute those assets to students to use in a classroom environment for educational purposes?

I am looking to develop a green screen virtual production environment and course at my school, which is why we have invested in implementing Unreal Engine into the school.

I had the privilege to participate in the Unreal Engine Educator Accelerator Course, and they pitched Unreal Engine as a great teaching and learning platform. I believe it still can be, but the Quixel pricing changes worry me.

1 Like

I’m also wondering about how the new monetization model will affect our teaching. I’ve been teaching Unreal Engine as part of several Media Arts courses at my university (environment design, virtual production, mocap, animation and cinematics), and the students having access to Megascans for free has been key to their learning experience.