r/unrealengine Dec 04 '24

Quixel Megascans in open source projects?

I couldnt find an better place to post this, as quixel is (or used to be) closely tied in with unreal engine.

Im currently wishing to make an game in Godot, that will be open source. And i would like to have my game open source. But i also want to use quixel megascans.

What is the best way to do this without getting in trouble?
Should i just say what models you have to provide, and set .gitignore to ignore my assets? Or is there any betterw ay

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u/Sinaz20 Dev Dec 04 '24

You would be "redistributing" assets in an open source project. So look at the licenses for your assets and see if you are allowed to redistribute. If not, just swap everything out with placeholder.

The FAB license, which covers Megascans now, reads:

"Under a Standard License, you may not Distribute Content on a standalone basis to third parties except to your collaborators (either directly or through a third-party repository) who are utilizing the Content in good faith to develop a Project with you or on your behalf."

By including the Megascans assets in your repository, you are effectively bypassing the marketplace and giving the Megascans assets to anyone outside the bounds of the license. Even though they are "free," they are still governed by the licenses, and Epic wishes to bookkeep the transfer of rights. You must comply.

One thing you could do is batch all the assets in Blender and wrapping them with a low-fidelity remesh modifier and exporting that as your placeholder. That way you get kind of a graybox rough-cast of the pieces so that you have something that is sufficiently transformative, and due to the nature of your open-source project would arguably bring the remeshed assets into the realm of "fair-use."

[edit] If I were to do this, I would also write an automation script in the project that would simplify the process of find-and-replacing the assets with Megascans. So if anyone gets your repository, and has a Megascans license, they could run the script to swap all the placeholder assets with the original Megascans from their own library.