Substance Designer Panels | Lesson 1 | Chapter 1 | Substance Designer 2021 Essential Series

Hello everyone, I'm Zeeshan Shah and welcome to Z Interactive.

So let's start our new exciting Substance Designer Essential Series with Chapter number one.

Which is introductions to Substance Designer, so we will go through our first lesson, which is about panels.

In this lesson, we will briefly go through different panels in Substance Designer.

Substance Designer is one of my favorite tools and I love it a lot.

Yeah, he loves it more than us.

No, no, this is not like that, this is not like that.

Yeah, it's true, and also this background is fake.

Hello everyone, I'm Zeeshan Shah and welcome to Z Interactive.

So let's start our new exciting Substance Designer Essential Series with Chapter one, which is introduction to Substance Designer.

So we will go through our first lesson, which is about panels, in this lesson, we will briefly go through different panels in Substance Designer.

To give you a quick rundown of what each panel does, let's first jump to the Explorer window.

So Explorer window, as you will see over here, is basically a file management system, this is where you'll open, close, build, and save your projects and graphs.

Then we have here the graph view, this is where you actually be doing the most of your work.

This is the main thing, this is the heart of Substance Designer, where all the magic is done, since this is where people construct their nodes, networks in order to produce complete materials, that's why we call it the heart of Substance Designer.

Now, here we have a properties, basically the parameters.

So to activate, let me just double click any one of these nodes so we can see what do we have here.

So the property window is simply any settings that you have for these individual nodes.

So they will vary depending on type of node that you have chosen.

So whatever node you will select from here, it will show different sort of parameters here.

Each parameters will be different from each other depending on whatever nodes you are selecting.

So, and they will also give you those settings for the graph as whole, if you double click in any one in this empty area.

So if I double click it here in the empty area, it will simply show me the whole graph property instead of the node's property.

So if you want the node property, just double click on the nodes, if you want the whole graph property, you just double click in the empty area and it will give you the whole graph property.

So like I said, the whole graph properties and these properties we will go through in detail in our next exercises and next lessons.

Now, below over here, you will see the 2D view.

The 2D view is just a 2D preview of any information that you have just picked inside the graph view.

So whatever you will double click here, you will notice that the 2D view is changing according to whatever node is selected here.

So if I double click it here, this is basically our normal node, so it will show us the normal.

Uniform color for the roughness will show here the roughness, if you double click the roughness directly or uniform here, basically it will show you that property here.

Metallic will show you the metallic here, and the uniform color of metallic will show you the uniform color of metallic here.

Whatever you will double click it here will show in the 2D preview here, the 2D view over here.

The one next to it is the 3D view, 3D view is a complete 3D preview of the whole graph.

Like all of these nodes will be shown inside here, showing you actually how it will look like in the end.

So this is where you get the whole preview of whatever graph you are working on.

The complete graph output will be shown over here in the 3D view.

So here we have the library.

So the library is simply a set of nodes from which you can construct your node network.

So the first thing I want to discuss is the window structure inside the substances.

Because all of these panels are that I can literally remove, like suppose if I want to remove this one, I can just click it and I can put it wherever I want.

So it is completely undockable and you can dock it wherever you want.

So this is how you can work with it.

For example, I will do some kind of changes here.

I really like to have more area here empty so I can work clearly inside the graph view.

So I usually move my 3D view somewhere here and dock it, and then I usually take my 2D view and I usually dock it here.

And if you will notice here, when I docked the 3D view, it is separately like docked in this area.

But it is making things quite cumbersome, quite short.

So what I can do is that to give more space, to have more space, I can take this 3D view and dock inside the library panel.

So if you will see, I'm I'll just go to the library panel and as soon I will drop it, you will see now I have here tabs.

So I have like a 3D view tab, I have library tab, so I can go back and forth to it.

Exactly the same thing I did here, so when I docked the 2D view, I docked the 2D view inside the Explorer window here.

So that it has become now the tab.

So if I want to go to my Explorer, because usually we don't go here like quite often.

We just go here whenever we need it, so most of the time you will be going to the 2D view.

So you can switch back and forth if you want to go to Explorer.

Now you can go to the like uniform color, so it's totally up to you.

So here as well if you want to work in the library, you just go to the library.

You can drag drop stuff over here, now you can see I have more space here than before.

So this is particularly helpful for those who like to work in a certain fashion.

Or who wants to save as much as space as possible by closing, shutting down the windows.

And you can literally shut the window by merely pressing the X next to it.

If you don't want to see any one of these, you can close it out.

Like suppose I don't want to see the Explorer, so I can just click on the Explorer and it will be closed.

But what if you have closed it unintentionally?

So you can bring it up again.

And how you can do that is you can just go to the window over here.

And inside the window, you can find whatever is open and whatever is closed.

So we can see that Explorer is not showing.

So as soon I will click on Explorer, it will bring it back again where it was before.

So this is how you can bring those back which are accidentally closed.

Or if you have closed it on purpose and you want to bring them somehow, so you can bring them in such a way.

Now, what if I don't like this whole view that I have done here?

I don't like it like this sort of a view and I want to go back to how it was before.

So I can do what, I can just go to Windows again on the top and I have this option here called Reset Layout.

As soon I will click on the Reset Layout, it will reset, it will ask me a question like, are you sure you want to restore the default window layout?

I'll say yes, so as soon I will press yes, it will just bring back everything as it was before.

So I have my library panel here, I have my Explorer window over here.

And I have all the other things that I was missing.

Another cool thing is that I usually enjoy working in the 3D vision.

On or 3D view on a second display.

I most of the time what I do is that I just undock it.

And I have a secondary window, I just move it to the secondary window so I can have my huge big window over here.

And I can work over there.

But for the purpose of this tutorial, I want to keep everything as it is.

I don't want to move it to the secondary window, so you can just if you have dual screen or you have ultra wide monitor.

So you can rearrange all these according to whatever you want.

And it will give you a perfect new like sort of a view, like windows.

So you can work very freely with a lot of space over there.

Another great feature of each panel is that you can pin specific windows.

So they start snapping on top of another.

So you will notice that there are some pin option here.

Okay, now what it do?

Suppose here I have some of these nodes, uniform color, base color.

Now I want to see how the base color looks like.

So if I double click on the base color, it will show me the base color here.

But now I want to see the normal, so I double click it here.

And I want to go back to my base color, so I have to go back here.

Now suppose I want to go to my ambient occlusion, so I can go to the ambient occlusion.

I can double click and I will get the ambient occlusion here.

But while I'm doing this, I have to scroll all the way up to go back here.

Then I have to go all the way back to to check the other one again, like ambient occlusion.

So it's quite annoying sometimes, especially when you have things which are completely, you know, spread over the graph view.

So it's really like becomes annoying when you do that.

So for to avoid that, we have this pinning option over here.

So let's do some sort of pinning, so I have this ambient occlusion and I will pin it here.

Okay, and then what I will do here is that I will go to normal and I will double click it here.

As soon I will do that, I will get a normal in a different tab.

I can pin this one here as well.

Now, I can go on the top and double click on the base color and it will give me a third tab.

Now, if it's up to you if you want to pin it or not.

But now if I want to go to ambient occlusion, I can just click on this tab and I will be in the ambient occlusion.

If I will if I want to go to the normal, I will just click on the normal or base color.

And quickly I can do that without going over here and moving around and then, you know, scrolling and then double clicking.

You can easily do that.

Now if you don't want these, you want to unpin them, okay, or you want to close them.

You can just do that, so unpinning or closing, it's totally up to you.

So this is how you can easily save your time by pinning.

Now this can be done here as well in the new graph, you have this option here.

So if you have, suppose if you have two or three different sort of graphs.

Let's let's do that, let's make move these items.

So don't worry about these changes what I'm doing over here.

Because we will go through in detail and see how the graph can be done.

I'm just showing you around the the way we can actually work with the pinning with the graph.

So I just made this sort of a graph and now all I can do is that I'll just click on a new graph.

Here, I'll just make a new graph.

Okay, so I'll just go here, new Substance graph.

Choose a graph and I will call this test or something like that.

And I will press okay over here, now I have this new graph.

And I will do some different sort of a changing here.

You know, just to show you around how it actually works.

And then I will go back to my new graph here, double click it here.

So now I'm in the new graph.

Now, again, I have to go back and forth and switch between the graphs.

So I want, so it takes a little time and it's kind of tedious, sometime annoying.

And if you want to avoid that, you can just go to the new graph or whatever graph you have here.

Uh, just press your pinning option here, the pinning button.

And double click on the other one.

And as soon it will be loaded, you can pin that as well.

And you can switch between any time instead of just going through double clicking here.

So this will work much more better if you have more graphs.

So in that scenario, this will like this is quite useful.

So again, in the drop down menu here, in the Windows, you can reset everything if you don't like.

And also you can go back to the whole tab thing like we have here by pinning these panels, these views.

So you can also drag windows on top of each other, like suppose I don't want to see this base color separately.

So I can just go here over this 3D view and drop my 2D view here.

So now my 2D view and 3D view are basically docked inside each other with the tabs.

So this is also you can do one thing and you can switch over.

Like suppose I want the maybe I want 3D here or maybe I want the 2D here.

So you can do a lot of these kind of things and you can make your own setup.

So there is something you should do as well.

Uh that if you have a second display, if you have a dual display or a wide screen monitor.

You can move them around so you can have a complete sort of a space.

And you can easily work, so that can be also done.

And this is basically a very handy, very useful or completely customizable interface.

So with the help of these customization, you can make your own setups.

So you can easily, freely work the way you want.

So I hope you have liked this lesson and I'm sure you will be waiting for the next lesson.

Our next lesson will cover the Explorer view in detail.

So this Explorer view, we will be covering in detail in our next lesson.

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