General Layout:
The General Layout of Substance Designer is divided up into 6 different sections. with some similarities to Substance Painter, Designer has a...
3D View: Where you can you view you material in 3D space
- in this view you can change the model that's rendering your material as well as import your own.
2D View: Where you can view your material in 2D space
- you can view any node in this view simply by double clicking on it in the graph editor
- hitting space bar in the 2D View will change the view to a tiling image.
Library: This is area where you can find all of your atomic nodes, environments, grunge maps, etc.
- by simply hitting space bar in the graph editor you can access a compressed version of the library and search and resource you want.
Properties: This display the editable information of the nodes.
- click on any node to edit them in the properties panel
Graph: This is where the action happens. In this space you will be placing your node networks here and developing your materials.
- Just above the graph is a list of tools called atomic nodes. These are more or less tools or functions that change your material across your node network. A kin to unreal engines multiply is Substance Designers Blend node. However, Designer is far more sophisticated.
Explorer: This is where you can view your Substance Package and your Substance graphs. Substance Designer makes use a parent and child relationship similar to most 3D softwares such Maya. You Substance Package is the parent and you Substance Graph is the child.
- you can view the substance graph in the graph editor
- it is possible to have many substance graphs in a single substance package.
- this is one of the many perks of substance designer because unlike painter; designer can ulitlize this parent and child relationship and blend many materials to create an entirely unique one.
- Substance Designer is also capable of exporting materials directly to Unreal Engine and Unity with the Substance plugin. This also you to directly make your substance materials as unreal materials.
- Substance Designer can also export materials straight to Substance Painter. Allowing artists to author their own materials.
- if a node has a sockets on the left side of it, that means that it will be used at the beginning of the node network
- if a node a has a socket on the right side of it, that means that it will be an output node, or the end of the network.
if there is a nod with a socket on both the right and left sides that means it a gonna be used as bridging nodes together.
the gray color sockets means that sockets with this color can only take in gray scale color data
the yellow nodes means the these sockets with this color can take color data
the nodes with both gray and yellow socket can take both gray scale and color data.
node networks are read left to right.
some color mode can be changed in the properties panel. Such as changing the Uniform Color atomic node from Color Data to Grayscale
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Substance Packages save as a .sbs file. This is the source document to your Substance Package, as .psd and a source document to Photoshop.
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Atomic Nodes:
Uniform Color: The Uniform Color node provides us with the ability to select any color we choose and output it to another node. We can also limit it to grayscale values only, constraining the selection to a value between black and white.
Blend: The Blend node allows us to mix together images. While simple in application, it is a very robust and useful node. We can change Blending modes, which will alter how pixels between our top and bottom image interact. We may alter the opacity of the blend, as well as play with cropping values for our top image.
Levels: The Levels node gives us the power to define the "limits" of the image that is used as input. We can manipulate the limits to remap the brightest, darkest and mid-values of our image.
Transformation 2D: The Transformation 2D node is about the closest we will come to working in a layer-based system. It allows us to manually adjust the input image (moving, rotating, scaling). It also provides tiling options in case we wish to have our image off any of the sides of the texture region.
Curve: The Curve node provides the same options as the Levels node, however it also allows for slightly more control over the values in between the "limits". By using a curve editor, we can create handles to adjust values at any point in our gradient.
Gradient Map: The Gradient Map node will allow us to convert grayscale data into colour data. It remaps the grayscale values to colour values along a gradient. This means that we can maintain colours even when we manipulate the original grayscale image.
Normal: The Normal node will convert any grayscale image into a colour image useable as a Normal map. It requires grayscale input to be used properly.
We can change the intensity, as well as Normal format (DirectX or OpenGL)
Text: The Text node allows us to create robust text within Substance Designer. While the use cases may be niche, trying to create text for use in a graph any other way will be significantly harder.
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