Substance 3D Designer user guide

Getting started

• Activation and licenses — This page has information on how to activate and manage your licenses so you can start using Designer.
• System requirements — This page lists system requirements and hardware compatibility information.
• Overview — This page gives an overview of Substance 3D Designer https://www.adobe.com/products/substance3d-designer.html, how it compares to the other applications in the Substance ecosystem and what sort of filetypes and resources you will work with.
• Workflow overview — This page explains the concept of Node-Based workflows, and provides a summary of the 3 main types of Graph you can author in Designer.
• Shortcuts — On this page you can find an overview of all shortcuts for Substance 3D Designer.
• Tutorials & learning — If you prefer to dive in with videos and other more focused learning material, these tutorials are good for getting started:

Interface

• Home screen — The Home screen welcomes you when you launch Substance 3D Designer. It is here to help you start working with the software and access most useful links.
• Customizing your workspace — This page presents the ways of arranging the panels in Adobe Substance 3D Designer’s https://www.adobe.com/products/substance3d-designer.html user interface, and leveraging their features to enhance your workflows.
• Main toolbar — This page describes the Main toolbar and menu of Adobe Substance 3D Designer, which appear at the top left of the main window.
• Preferences — This page presents the Preferences window and all its settings.
• Explorer — This page describes the Explorer dock in Adobe Substance 3D Designer. This dock lets you manage packages and their resources.
• Graph view — This page presents the Graph view of Substance 3D Designer.
• Library — This page presents the Library panel of Substance 3D Designer, its layout as well as the tools it offers for searching and filtering content.
• Properties — This page presents the Properties panel of Substance 3D Designer, its layout and the different rollouts and categories and parameters you can find within. It is focused on properties for Substance graphs. function graphs, MDL graphs and FX-Map graphs have simpler layouts.
• 2D view — This pages describes the user interface and features of the 2D View panel in Substance 3D Designer.
• 3D view — The 3D View helps you view and understand your materials with custom meshes and rendered PBR materials.
• Dependency manager

Substance graphs

• Substance graph key concepts
• Creating a Substance graph
• Exposing a parameter
• Graph parameters
• Inheritance in Substance graphs
• Output size
• Values in Substance graphs
• Publishing Substance 3D asset files (SBSAR)
• Exporting bitmaps
• Exporting PSD files
• Sample Substance graphs
• Warnings in Substance graphs
• Nodes reference for Substance graphs

Resources

• Importing, linking and new resources
• Bitmap resource
• Vector graphics (SVG) resource
• 3D scene resource
• AxF (Appearance eXchange Format)
• Font resource
• Warnings from dependencies

Pipeline and project configuration

• Project configuration files - SBSPRJ
• Configuration list - SBSCFG
• User preferences - Automating setup
• Retrieving the installation path
• Environment variables

Technical issues

• Warnings and errors
• Cannot create/load a project
• Application does not start
• Crash when rendering graphs
• Parameters not working as expected
• Incorrect image output
• 3D view issues
• User interface issues