‘Material blending’ does not work in ‘Quixel Megascan Brigde in unreal 5.2’. Last month, I showed an error message that says, “You can’t blend more than three material instances,” and now it says, “Choose two or three material instances.” (Of course, even though I’ve run the blending with three selected.)
Hey there, I’m happy to help with this. We are looking into this issue, however, I do have a workaround to share in the meantime.
This may be a bit lengthy, but please bear with me, as this is a comprehensive guide.
First, you’ll need to import an asset to be painted on.
The number of vertices is important. The more verts, the smoother the transition will be when painting on your object.
Right-click in your Content Drawer or Content Browser and select “Add Quixel Content” to open Bridge, or alternatively, import your own textures.
Go to Surfaces and select the surfaces you’d like to use in your Blend material.
The Material Blend provided by Quixel can support up to three different materials simultaneously - plus an additional channel for puddles. I will explain more on that later in this guide.
Once you’ve selected, downloaded, and added your chosen surfaces from Bridge, click the slider menu Icon in the bottom-right corner to open the Megascans Settings panel. Leave this open.
Back in the Content Drawer - select the three Surface folders you downloaded so that all of the material instances are displayed within the Browser at the same time.
Select the three Surface Material Instances that you want to use in your blend. Note - the order in which you select the materials at this point is important. The first material selected will be your Base, the second, the middle, and the third, the top layer.
With the instances selected, go back to your Megascans Settings window and select “Create Material Blend.” Note the Destination path, by default, is within your Content Folder, so a new Folder named Blend Material will be created and the new material will be stored there.
Currently, there is an issue with the Blend Material creation, despite having selected three material instances, the editor will throw an error telling you that the blend material can’t contain more than 3 material instances. Click “OK.”
As a workaround, we’ll repeat the last few steps of the process, but this time, we’ll only select one material instance.
With a single instance selected (your base layer) go back to the Megascans Settings window and click Create Material Blend.
This time, the BlendMaterials folder will be created, and a Blend material will be stored there, however - it will only contain the single material instance we chose, so you can’t paint a blend with it yet.
Double-click the newly created Blend Material instance to open the Blend Material instance’s details. Here, we’ll notice that there are three layers Base Layer, Middle Layer, and Top Layer. We’ll need to manually slot the textures for the Middle and Top Layers.
With the Content Browser and Material Instance Details window open side-by-side, select the folder for the material instance containing your Middle Layer. Drag and drop the Albedo, Normal, and packed map into their respective slots.
With the Content Browser and Material Instance Details window open side-by-side, select the folder for the material instance containing your Top Layer. Drag and drop the Albedo, Normal, and packed map into their respective slots.
Your material instance should now contain a total of 9 textures. Please also note that all Parameter boxes for the assigned textures are ticked - otherwise, your texture slots will not have been filled correctly.
For full control over your blend, ensure that you’ve enabled Top Layer Blend Controls, Base/Middle Layer Blend Controls within your material instance. Additionally, tick on the “Use Puddle Layer” option to paint water with the blue channel. If you do not do this, the Blue channel will remain unused in your blend.
Assign the Blend material to your asset and then open the Mesh Paint Selection mode from the UI.
Swap the Paint and Erase colors so that Black is Paint and White is Erase. Then, tick the channel you want to paint with. The Base material is applied to the surface by default, painting with Red will paint the Middle layer, Green - the top layer, and Blue - the puddle layer.
Here we’ve painted with Red
Here we’ve painted with Green
And here we’ve painted with Blue.
This issue has been reported to our developers and should be resolved with the next update to Bridge in UE5.
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Hi there!
I’ve tried this way but I can not drag and drop or can not replace textures… Is there any other way?
I am on 5.2.1
Thanks
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I tried the workaround - Same Issue - It seems we can’t load the material slots. It wont accept the textures for some reason. I’m in Unreal 5.3.
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SAME ISSUE HERE, I’M ALSO IN THE 5.3 AND IN THE ARCHITECTURAL PART.
I CAN’T BLEND THE MATERIAL. It keep shows error and I cant even edit manually to change the albedo or ard material
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I have the same issue, can’t drag and drop the textures into the blend material.
Read that it might be because of virtual texture streaming, but no idea what to do about it! Any ideas what I can do to make it work?
(UE 5.3.2, Bridge 2023.0.6)
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Hey everyone! There’s been a recent update to the Bridge plugin for Unreal Engine 5. If this issue persists for you, please try uninstalling and reinstalling the plugin via the Vault tab within the Epic Games launcher. To do this, kindly follow the steps below. These steps will work for whichever version of Unreal Engine 5 that you are using.
- Click “Library” while in the Unreal Engine tab in the Epic Games launcher, then click "Installed Plugins " under the version of Unreal Engine 5 you are working with. Once selected, you’ll see a pop-up that will show your installed plugins. Click “Remove” as highlighted by the red box in the below screenshot:
- Scroll down to your Vault at the bottom of the Library tab, and locate the Quixel Bridge plugin. If needed, you can use the search bar as shown in the screenshot below. After you’ve located the plugin within your Vault, please click "Install to Engine " to reinstall the plugin.
- Once the plugin has completed installation, please open UE5 and then test to see if the issue persists.
If so, please feel free to reach out to our Support team using this form. We would be happy to further assist!
hi there is blue channel in dialog box using puddler. how to fix
Hello, you are trying to add a virtual texture to a non virtual texture slot, hence why it is not working.
I can confirm that the above solution is working when using non virtual textures.
basket random said:
Blockquote hi there is blue channel in dialog box using puddler. how to fix
Have you enabled the “Use Puddle Layer” option in your material settings?
Kind of crazy this tool still doesn’t work. Using 5.3, uninstalled and reinstalled Bridge and having the same issues (can’t select 3 surfaces in Bridge and create blend material as intended).
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