Tuesday, April 30th, 2019 Posted by Jim Thacker

Quixel supports the MDL material format in Megascans

An overview of Nvidia’s Material Definition Language, shared on YouTube by Chaos Group. Quixel has just announced that its Megascans library of real-world scan data is to support the cross-platform material format.


Quixel has announced that it is to support Nvidia’s Material Definition Language in Megascans, its popular online library of real-world scan data.

The move will make Megascans data available as readymade material files that can be used in compatible renderers and game engines, rather than just sets of 2D texture maps.

Supported in key offline and real-time render engines
The news makes Quixel the latest developer to adopt the Material Definition Language, following Nvidia’s decision to open-source the SDK last year.

The MDL format is currently supported by a range of key render engines, including Chaos Group’s V-Ray, the Iray plugins, and Unreal Studio, Epic Games’ new real-time visualisation platform.

Other DCC tools to use the format include Allegorithmic’s Substance Painter and Substance Designer, and Dimension, Adobe’s ‘3D compositing’ application.

As well as simplifying the material set-up process, the MDL format is intended to enable materials to display more consistently from one application to the next.

Pricing and availability
Megascans subscriptions cost from $29/month for Personal plans to just under $12k/year for Business plans.

Updated 1 May 2019: MDL export is now available in Quixel Bridge 2019, the latest version of Quixel’s tool for managing Megascans exports.

Read Quixel’s announcement that Megascans is to support the MDL format on its blog