Megascans are free again, and now you can train AI on them
On November 5, 2026, Quixel made the entire Megascans library free on the Fab marketplace. At the same time, the company updated the terms of use for all of its assets: Megascans scans and Megaplants vegetation may now be used to train your own AI models. For environment artists, level designers and visualization specialists, this means the photogrammetry scan library is once again available at no cost, and its contents can be used as training material.
The paid model lasted less than two years. Quixel promises to refund anyone who paid for Megascans during that period.
Who gets a refund and how
Refunds apply to everyone who bought Megascans or the Quixel Bundle on January 1, 2025 or later. The money is credited to the Epic Account balance and can be spent on any Epic product, not just on Fab. The procedure is as follows:
- you need to sign in to your Epic Account and accept the latest terms, if you haven't already;
- the funds will appear in the balance before the end of 2026;
- you can check the balance on Fab.com after signing in, in the top right corner;
- in case of problems, the company suggests contacting Fab support.
Purchases are not taken away from buyers: the license stays with them, and the new AI rights are added to it.
«You keep your license and gain new usage rights for AI».
That is how Quixel worded the terms for those receiving a refund. For studios with a separate Quixel studio license, the company says their licenses remain in effect under the terms of the contracts they signed; for questions it refers them to their representative.
What the AI training permission changes
Until now, assets were taken from the library to be placed in a scene: a rock, bark, cobblestones, a bush. Now Quixel explicitly allows the same scans to be used as training data. The company describes the scenario like this: a model learns from real scans and then helps generate diverse photorealistic environments for projects. For a studio building its own material or vegetation generator, this apparently settles the question of where to get a legal dataset of consistent quality.
The detailed text of the new terms is not given in the announcement. It is unclear from the statement whether selling trained models is permitted, whether the datasets themselves may be distributed, and whether there are restrictions on generating assets that resemble Megascans. Nor is it specified how the new rights relate to Fab's rules regarding generative AI. Anyone planning to train models in a commercial project would do well to read the final version of the terms before starting work.
How the library went to a paid model and back
In September 2024, Quixel announced that Megascans would move to Fab, Epic Games' new marketplace. With Fab's launch in October 2024, scans were sold only there, and new additions stopped appearing on Quixel.com and in Bridge: they arrived via Fab.com and the Fab integration in Unreal Engine 5.3 and newer and in UEFN. Content downloaded under the paid subscription was automatically transferred to the Fab library when signing in with the same Epic account.
Until the end of 2024, all Megascans were free under the Fab Standard license. According to Epic's help page, a single click back then let you grab more than 17,000 assets, including 10 packs with new scene files from Quixel, and use them in any package and engine. From 2025 the library switched to Fab's paid model with prices in dollars instead of the previous points, and the change also affected users on Unreal Engine plans. That scheme has now been cancelled, and the money paid for it is being refunded.
Who benefits and what remains unclear
The biggest winners, it appears, are those who missed the chance to grab the scans during the free window of 2024: indie developers, students and visualization specialists who entered the profession in 2025–2026. The entire library is now available to them. Those who paid in 2025–2026 essentially get their money back as an Epic balance tied to the company's ecosystem. Judging by the wording, the new terms have been updated for all Quixel assets, so a library assembled in 2024 probably also falls under the AI training permission.
The reversal is likely connected to the paid model failing to take hold among an audience used to getting Megascans together with Unreal Engine. The AI training permission, meanwhile, turns the library into a legal training set, and there appear to be few such collections of real scans with a clear license. Still open are the questions that determine the long-term value of the giveaway: will the library be expanded with new scans and Megaplants, and what lies ahead for Bridge and the plugins for DCC packages? The announcement says nothing about this.
The free library is available on the Quixel Megascans page on Fab.
Why did Quixel return Megascans to free access: weak sales, dissatisfaction among Unreal users, or a bet on the market for AI data?