Quixel Material assets are missing ORDp format on FAB

Development Quixel Megascans
1

Hello,

now that Quixel content is only available on FAB, how can I access the ORDp material format that was available on Quixel Bridge? On FAB, quixel material/texture set assets are only available in the legacy ORM format where the M channel is usually empty.

I’ve spent couple of years building what I thought would be a future-proof pipeline, which utilizes the Displacement channel of the ORDp maps for things like heightmap based material blending and bump offset/parallax depth shading. But now, the assets can no longer be acquired through Bridge, and FAB only downloads the legacy format that has no heightmap.

There’s only 16bit heightmap in the High resolution version of the assets, but that doesn’t make sense:

  1. Why is the availability of the heightmap tied to the texture set resolution?
  2. Even if I use LOD bias to reduce resolution of the texture loaded to VRAM, my project sizes will be absolutely massive if I have to download 4k texture sets for every single material, even for materials where I need 1k or 2k at most.
  3. The download times will be unnecessarily long.
  4. Since the heightmap channel is separate, not packed to ORDp texture, I am wasting a LOT of VRAM.
  5. Material management becomes a lot more complex and frustrating, needing to have explicit heightmap texture sampler instead of neatly self-contained packed texture.
  6. Existing pipelines built on years of Quixel content format need to be re-done.
  7. The 16 bit heightmap at 4k occupies a massive nearly 100MB size in the memory. The entire packed ORDp textures with AO and Roughness next to the Dp would take just 12MB of memory at the same resolution.
  8. Only way to fix it and avoid the waste of VRAM and resources, I need to export heightmap to the external format, remap it from 16bit to 8bit, pack it to a duplicate of ORM and save it as a ORDp copy. Even when streamlined/scripted, this is a multi-minute process per texture. This means using Megascans is no longer just one click download process, but about 10 minutes of work per every downloaded texture set, to fix the unnecessarily high resolution, VRAM wasting heightmap format and re-pack the texture set to ORDp.

On Fab, what benefits am I a getting in return for all these massive drawbacks, compared to Bridge? :confounded:

I’ve made a mistake of relying on the Quixel library but this sets me back so far.