Substance Designer 2.1 Tutorials
Starting a Substance / SVG Node
Subtitles of the Movie (Substance Designer 2.1 / Starting a Substance / SVG Node)
In this video we're going to go ahead and continue on with where we left off. You can see here that I have the Uniform Color Node and by the way, I just wanted to point out to you that we can click and drag these nodes anywhere we want to and you'll see that they're snapping to that grid that's in the background. And maybe hard to make out that grid in the video but you'll see it in your version of Substance Designer and it just snaps to those grid points which can be very useful sometimes. Now basically what I want to do is, I want to bring in another resource that we're going to be using as an input. What I want to do is, I want to come over here to our Untitled Package, I want to Context Click on this and I want to say, Import Resources. I want to come up to our Work Files and in the 02 Folder, you're going to find that we have a number of resources that we're going to be working with in this chapter. The one I want to look at right now is Jason underscore signature.SVG. I'm going to go ahead and open this, now if you're not familiar with what SVG is, it's stands for Scaleable Vector Graphics and it's the same type of thing that you'd be working with in a program like Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw. Now the basic concept of Vector Graphics is that instead of using pixels, it uses vector data and these points and Bezier curves are the things that ultimately define what the image is made of. Now this is much more efficient in terms of file size than pixels are, so we want to use SVG within Substance Designer whenever possible. Now the way that we can get SVG is we can output SVG files from programs like Adobe Illustrator but we can also use freeware programs like InkScape. Now InkScape is a really nice program that is completely Open Source and free, you can download it off the web and use it and it has a lot of the same types of functionalities as the previously mentioned Vector Graphics Applications but it outputs SVG natively. And one of the strengths of working with these SVG files is that we can then bring them into Substance Designer and they can be used as images or as masks. So I'm going to go ahead and just grab this resource that we brought in here and drag it right onto my graph like so and you can see that creates an SVG Node and within that SVG Node we now have that Vector Graphics image that we've created. So this was created within InkScape and it's just brought in as such, this is my signature that I use for my artwork. This SVG Node, you'll notice that it has a background input and you can see that it accepts either color or gray scale and then it has a color output. We can do a lot with these SVGs and I'm going to be spending a whole chapter on the different ways that you can work with SVGs so it's very, very powerful. But one of the nice things about working with this, is that we can set the background so in this particular instance, I'm just going to go ahead and set our Uniform Color for our background. And you can see boom, our Uniform Color is now the background for our SVG and then we can then continue to output that out. Now if we wanted to, at the same time, we could bring this SVG in a completely different way. So I'm just going to go ahead and click on this, Context Click like so and then say Delete Selection and if I go ahead and use the Spacebar instead, you'll see that we do have an SVG Node Option here on our Filters. You can see that we get From New Resource or From File, now the idea with From New Resource is that we can create our own SVG within Substance Designer and it will create a new resource. So if I click that, it'll say okay, what do we want to name the new resource? And we'll just leave the name right now for New Resource, the type is Vectorial, and it's the only type that we have available to us right now. The width is 512 by 512 which is okay for what we're about to do. We say OK and then in here we could use the various different tools which again, I'll go over in great depth when we're dealing with this in our SVG chapter. But the point basically being here, is that if you come down, you'll see that, that is a New Resource that's created within our Resources Folder and if we wanted to, we could just drop this right into our Resources Folder like so. And now both of these are within our Resources Folder and again if we wanted to create an SVG Node from this file here, we could just come over here and come over here to SVG from File. Now what that'll do is it'll go back up to our Work Files in our 02 Folder and grab that Jason Signature.SVG. Now the reason why I don't like to use this method right off the bat is because when we come in, we get some options here. We can link it, which basically means that it won't be editable or we can embed it and generally speaking you want to embed if you want to be able to edit that SVG. And then we have some options here, we have Resize, Fit Large Side, Fit Small Side and Original Size. Now the reason why you would need these is if you didn't custom make your SVG to work with in Substance Designer. Meaning that it's not square, meaning that it's not a power of 2 image size. So we can choose to Resize it, we can choose to Fit the Large Side, Fit the Small Side or have it come in at Original Size. So I'll just go ahead and say I'll have this come in at Original Size but what you'll see is that it doesn't just come in as the one node it comes in as two nodes. It comes in as the SVG Node but then it also has a Transform 2D and we're not really ready to look at these Transform 2Ds yet, so that's the reason why I didn't show you this right off the bat. I much prefer the other workflow here and I'll just go ahead and Context Click these and say Delete Selection which is going to delete both those. I prefer just to bring in that resource and then just drop it like so because this way we have a little bit more control, we don't have extra nodes popping up for no reason. Now again, like I say, we can come in here and we can say okay, let's go ahead and link in that Uniform Color as our background color for our SVG and then even if we wanted to, we could bring this in and use that as our background. And then you can see here, that we can build up fairly complex images using our SVG, very quickly and very easily. So SVG, very powerful and like I said, we'll have a whole chapter devoted to working with SVG in the future.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Substance Designer 2.1 |
| Author: | Jason Maranto |
| SKU: | 34327 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-61866-040-4 |
| Release Date: | 2012-04-09 |
| Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 85 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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