How to Add Collision to Quixel Assets in UE5

Quixel is one of the most popular asset libraries in the world and is fully integrated into the new Epic Games UE5 early release. Quixel Megascans have a variety of different objects that can be used to make your game or animation look more realistic. One issue with quixel, however, is that it doesn’t come with collision enabled out of the box. In this article, I will show you how to add collision to Quixel assets in UE5 so you can navigate freely around and on objects in your world.

So what is collision?

Collision is the physical interaction between two objects in a game environment. It provides an interactive and responsive environment for players to navigate around on foot or in vehicles.

With Quixel, collision can be added to the mesh by using something called “colliders”. Colliders are invisible volumes that attach to your mesh so you know when it has touched another object. Think of it as highly decimate simple mesh surrounding your more complicated dense geometry.

With the new version of Unreal Engine UE5, the entire Quixel library is a simple drag and drop option. Go to the Content tab. Select Quixel Bridge to access the library.

Once you have this library accessible its just a simple search, drag and drop.

Getting the assets into the level is super easy and convienant and just so you know that I’m not saying that this is a negative thing but the assets come in without any collision properties. In game mode you can literal walk through the mesh.

So we need to add collision to these objects. But first let’s just look at this image quality. This is right out of the box with Lumen enabled. The asset is using the nanite technology so the detail is just amazing.

But we want to stand on the side of this well. So let’s add collision. Open the mesh by selecting it and finding its location. Then open it from the content library. At the top go to Collision tab.

Add the level of collision that you need for the object. There are a variety of settings so play around with the one you feel fits the object the best and has the least number of faces. In this case I chose 26 faces.

As you can see in the image above it creates another wireframe mesh over the object in green. This is the mesh that your character and objects will collide with.

Now your character will be able to stand and walk over the object. No longer walking through the mesh. But as you can see from this example the mesh is rather crude and if we want to move closer to the object and even drop down in side the well we will have to increase the collision on this object far greater than the 26 faces.

Open the object and on the right browse down to collision. Change the method to use complex as simple. This will create a much more detailed collision mesh and allow your character to interact with the element with more precision.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what projects your working on and if you have had a chance to check out the UE5 early release.