Epic Makes Quixel Megascans Free Permanently, Adding AI Training Rights

Epic Games has made its entire Quixel Megascans library — roughly 23,000 photogrammetry-based 3D scanned assets — free indefinitely, and this time the company says the change is permanent.

Access was first made free for a limited window two years ago, when Epic launched its Fab marketplace in 2024. That offer expired. The new arrangement has no end date.

What's in the library?

Megascans contains thousands of production-ready items built by scanning real-world objects and environments. The catalogue spans:

• 3D models
• Tileable physically based rendering (PBR) surfaces
• Vegetation
• Decals
• Custom materials

On the Fab marketplace itself, the listings range from furniture and architecture to creatures, vehicles and materials. Quixel says listings will be updated item by item until November 12 to switch everything to free.

What changed in the licence terms?

The most consequential update goes beyond price. Epic has revised the terms for Quixel assets so that Megascans and Megaplants content can now be used to train AI models.

"Your AI models can now learn from real-world scans to help you generate varied, photorealistic environments for your projects," the company said.

For studios weighing generative pipelines, that's a meaningful shift: a legally clear, large-scale corpus of real-world scans now sits inside a licence that explicitly permits model training. That permission had not existed under the old terms.

What about people who paid?

Epic hasn't left recent customers out of pocket. Anyone who bought a Megascans asset or a Quixel Bundle on or after January 1, 2025 will receive a refund to their Epic Account Balance by the end of the year. They keep their existing licence and gain the new AI rights.

The balance isn't locked to Fab, either — it can be spent across Epic's products.

Can you use the assets outside Unreal Engine?

Yes. Fab was designed to make cross-engine use straightforward, with Channels that help you discover assets compatible with your game engine. The marketplace offers a Creative Commons licence alongside the Personal and Professional tiers of a Standard License.

Epic's press release puts it plainly: "The Fab Standard License enables you to use the assets, including Megascans, in any game engine or tool you want."

That wording matters for the asset's real audience — game developers, 3D artists, VFX houses and architectural visualisation teams — many of whom work in tools other than Unreal.

Why it matters

A permanently free, 23,000-item library of photoreal scanned surfaces and models removes one of the larger recurring costs in environment art, and the AI-training clause arrives just as studios are deciding which corpora they can legally feed into generative tooling.

With refunds flowing to 2025 buyers and listings going free through November 12, the remaining question is how quickly competitors' stock-asset marketplaces respond — and whether an explicitly AI-trainable library pushes scanned assets from a premium purchase into baseline studio infrastructure.