Quixel Linux

[Milton Beaty]

Quixel_Bridgeis available as an AppImage which means "one app = one file", which you can download and run on your Linux system while you don't need a package manager and nothing gets changed in your system. Awesome!

AppImages are single-file applications that run on most Linux distributions. Download an application, make it executable, and run! No need to install. No system libraries or system preferences are altered.Most AppImages run on recent versions of Arch Linux, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and other common desktop distributions.

If you would like to have the executable bit set automatically, and would like to see Quixel_Bridge and other AppImages integrated into the system (menus, icons, file type associations, etc.), then you may want to check the optional appimaged daemon.

Please consider to add update information to the Quixel_Bridge AppImage and ship a .zsync file so that it can be updated using AppImageUpdate. Tools like appimagetool and linuxdeployqt can do this for you easily.

Started with RHEL clone, Rocky Linux (I hope they survive the hostilities from Red Hat/IBM). Moved to Fedora (Much more modern Gnome desktop and mostly better, except for the occasional thing breaking due to frequent updates)

Installing NVIDIA drivers is actually quite easy. If you are using Rocky Linux, just paste a few lines in the terminal (your mileage may vary depending on this being a moving ball. But it worked for me with 208oti and 3090)

Performance wise, I believe there are some benefits to GPU rendering on Linux as it reserve less vRam for the OS. Windows can hog a lot and really reduce the amount of vRam available to render engines/Apps.

Maya

.RPM offically supported on most RHEL including Rocky. I have it working on Fedora too. Have had it working on Debian distros but it is a lot of work and not really worth it.

Plasticity

A great NURBS modeller, but bizarrely only compiles a stable .deb and does not officially support .RPM distros. Their github has a .RPM compile which seems to work fine on Fedora but when I asked their support they were really unhelpful.

FreeCAD

Flatpak. A nice little CAD app. Mostly a poor mans Solidworks, but I find it useful to open 3D NURBS models downloaded from GRABCAD and convert them to mesh.

OK, and the results are in. Just on render time, there is a fraction of a second difference between the two. To find a winner, I would probably have to make several renders, and still, the difference would be so small as to be not worth worrying about.

For the record. Simple scene. Preparation time on Windows and Linux was too small to measure. Render time was 39 seconds each. On the complex scene, preparation time took 1m 1s on Windows, 1 Min 8 sec on Linux, Total render time was 11m 55s on each (given the fraction of a second I discounted). That suggests that, on very complex scenes, there may be an advantage on Linux, but to be honest, probably not worth worrying about.

I thought this was an interesting test since I got interested in retro programing and tech and I wondered if that was artificially slow or emulating basic on top of JS was more demanding than I thought, turns out maybe is the second, and that run way too good on linux :P.

I can mirror the experience of having long load times for Blender. Takes some 5 seconds to see the default cube even with no add-ons installed. Issue seems to have gotten worse since version 4.0. Brand new windows installation, with no previous blender installs.

Based on what I found last month, software is now getting so heavy and so bloated in cases that its very presence can eventually make your computer run like mud (because of processes they perform even while they are closed).

Does anyone know a way of getting quixel mixer downloaded materials (folders) into 3d coat. 3d coat requires a zip file and the only way i`ve found is to rezip the quixel folders.

I found an automated way of doing it but it also zips up the parent folder which 3d coat doesnt recognise.

So here are locally downloaded quixel mixer materials.

I tried this method. How to create individual ZIP files from folders (itsupportguides.com)

But it creates this as a zip for each folder, but 3d coat wont see the material as its in a sub folder called Concrete_Damaged....

The complete install worked like a charm, 3dcoat back to normal, thanks on explaining that. that means the "problem" definitely was in the documents folder, because after the first uninstall the problem existed. remove the document folder and all is well.

anyway, after the clean install i tried adding the quixel materials again... first shot, i did the manual install from the zips to a desired folder for the quixel mats. no slowdown, however in BOTH the preview and when applied they were "flat", no normals/bump/displacement applied as before. no broken material error prompts either. but as they didnt work, and i knew how to "fix" the slowdown, i set 3dcoat for autodetect, which it did (i believe my issue earlier was not pointing out the EXACT folder location), and proceeded to load the shaders in. the previews showed the expected bump, but when applied i got broken material error prompts, and no bump. this no bump issue wasnt noticed the other day, so at this point, im just sticking w/ my clean install and nevermind quixel for now, im DEEPLY disappointed =( maybe there is something wrong with how 3dcoat is reading the zip?!? also, we should be able to specify which folder imported shaders go into. they load in the default folder, and from what ie seen of the quixel shaders so far, if they get moved, they stop working?!?

Thanks i had seen that but i dont think its the same issue, mine is using the quixel software that downloads its material but it doesnt use the zip format, it just expands them into a texture library. For 3d coat to recognise them they seem to be needed to be in zip format, so i need to pack the folders into a zip to import. But with 20-30 folders i`d like to automate it to create zips without a parent folder so 3d coat picks them up.

For context my Quixel Directory is "D:\QUIXEL\Downloaded\surface"

I used WSL Windows Subsystem for Linux so my path is defined as "/mnt/d/QUIXEL/Downloaded/surface".

But this can also be done via PowerShell where you can use the windows file system native path.

I have already done a feature request where 3DCoat does a recursive folder import, so even if there is a parent directory it recursively searches for all files ending in *.jpg or *.png and imports them appropriately.

My primary thing is drawing, and that goes flawlessly! I was already using Krita with some Blender here and there, so the transition was seamless - just straight up getting the same software and using it the same way.

When it comes to general image editing, it's a bit less flawless. I was using Affinity Photo for that, but Wine doesn't like it for now, so I gotta use something else. GIMP is unfortunately pretty awful, so that's out too. For now I've just been using Krita for that, but it's not really suited for things that aren't drawing. Gotta figure something out!

I do vector art sometimes, and the situation is similar since I used Affinity Designer before. Thankfully this time the alternative is much better! Inkscape is a pretty competent program, though it does have a few very confusingly lacking features. It overall does the job tho!

3D graphics are a slightly mixed bag: the main ingredient, Blender, is amazing! Equally amazing is Material Maker, which a lot more people should hear about, which lets you procedurally create materials, akin to Substance Designer. In a lot of ways I think it does things better than designer too! The spot that seems the sorest to me is painting textures. I don't really wanna touch Adobe stuff (and I'm not sure if it works in Wine). There's a program called ArmorPaint, but I've heard mixed things about it and I didn't try it out yet cause it's a bit hard to access (paid binaries or compile yourself). Quixel Mixer seems to work in Wine, so for now I'll go with that (is this still in development?)!

If you want to stick to open source software exclusively, LibreSprite is an Aseprite fork that's basically just Aseprite but GPL. (The main reason LibreSprite came into existence is because the Aseprite devs relicensed the program from the GPL to a semi-proprietary, source available license.)

yeahhhh i mained linux for a few months but i inevitably switched back to windows, partially because of the lack of good 2d raster design programs you described here. i really hope linux gets its own good alternative to photoshop sooner rather than later...

This is reminding me of when I tested the waters with Linux as a teen, and was overjoyed to see that Wine ran FireAlpaca pretty much flawlessly. It was the drawing program I basically learned digital art on and I still use it to this day (tried Krita once but it didn't have quite the same magic to me, still really cool that it exists though).

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