Substance Designer 2.1 Tutorials
Welcome / Packages
Subtitles of the Movie (Substance Designer 2.1 / Welcome / Packages)
So we're going to go ahead and continue on by looking at our Packages Panel now. The important thing to understand about our Packages Panel is that it's an organizer. The basic function of Packages is to hold all of our information whether they be graphs or whether they be folders or whether they be assets, all of that is going to be packed into our Package. And the main function of Packages is just to sort of organize things and keep things in a way that you can work with them without them taking over the interface. So if we come over here to Packages, you'll notice that we have Advanced Filters, Base Filters, Functions, Resources, Base Elements, Composite and Templates Packages that come preinstalled with Substance Designer. And basically these are just assets that you can use that are ready for you at any point in time that you need them within Substance Designer. But they're also really good examples of what you can do with your own Package. So let's just go ahead and go to Advanced Filters and we're going to go ahead and twirl that open and within Advanced Filters, you'll find that there is an Advanced Filters Folder. And if I twirl that open you'll find that we have Bitmap to Material, Canvas, Channels, Compositing and Normal Maps. So if I go ahead and twirl open Bitmap to Material, you'll find that we have a whole bunch of substances here and I'll just go ahead and scroll over so we can see this. So you can see we have Bitmap to Material, Light and Cancel, so on and so forth. These various graphs can also be twirled open and what you'll see here is our various different Inputs and Outputs. So basically the idea here is that we can have a nice hierarchy for organizing a lot of information within one Package and that is true of our Package as well as the Packages that come preinstalled. So let's just go ahead and click on this Bitmap to Material Graph and when I do that, you'll notice that my parameters over here have changed. Now all of my Base Parameters are still Relative to Parent which is probably the best thing for this, however if we come down to Attributes, you'll notice that it has a different Identifier which is Bitmap to Material. It has a Disable Outputs of true, it has a description and then it also has a Label. But below that we also have a whole bunch of Inputs and if you remember I told you that these Inputs that you see here at the base level, these are going to be the things that can be changed outside of Substance Designer. So these Inputs are very, very important at the base level of this graph. If we click over here to Light and Cancel for instance, you'll find that we only have one Input, on this one you'll find that we have two Inputs and so on and so forth. So just keep an eye over here on your descriptions as well as your Inputs when you're working within your Packages because this will tell you an awful lot about what's going on with the various different graphs as well as what's going on with the various different folders. These are all very customizable and organizable in terms of their attributes and you can work with these at any point in time you want to, not these ones that come up here, but as far as your own Package. So let me just go ahead and click on My Package and we'll go ahead and Context with that. We can see that we can Add a New Graph, a New Layer Graph, a New Function, a New Resource, Link Resources, Import Resources or Create a New Folder. We also have the option to Reload, Save, Save As, Publish, Copy, Paste, Close, Rename, Compute Selected or Explore. Now if we come down here and we click on the Untitled Graph and Context Click on it, you can see that we have Open, New Folder, Copy, Paste, Remove, Rename, View Outputs, Compute Selected and Explore. We also have a Toolbar here at the top of our Packages and this is going to give us different options depending upon what we actually have selected. So if I select my Untitled Package and I click this little Down Arrow, you'll see we get, New Graph, New Layer Graph, New Function, New Resource, New Folder and New Package. If I click over here, you can see we get Link Resources, Import Resources, Open Package. This is a Save Button that is a Play Button that will launch this in the Player. We can choose to Publish, if I click over here on the graph, you'll see that I only get the option for New Folder or New Package or Open Packages and Save and Play. If I click up here to Advance Filters I'll get the same options that I got for the previous Packages although these are all grayed out and the reason why is because, you see this little lock symbol? These are Locked Substances, we cannot actually make any changes to these and the reason why is because we wouldn't want to. If we made changes to this, it would actually effect all of the Substances that we would build from these parts. So we generally don't want to change that and that's the reason why you see this little Lock Icon. I'll just scroll over so you can see that. You can also see that these are in fact Packages that reside on your system. You can actually find these in your Install Folder and they're under whatever name you see listed here. So you could actually open these and work with these if you wanted to, however, like I said they are locked. So generally speaking it's best just to leave them alone because you don't really want to change those. However as you can see, there is no lock on ours and when we go to save this out, then we'll have the name of that as well wherever that needs to be. So those are our basic functions of our Package and let's just go ahead and take a look at some of the hierarchies that we can set up here. So I'm going to go ahead and Context Click on this and I'm going to say that I want to Create a New Folder and then that new folder is going to be directly listed at first level just like this Untitled Graph. If I click on the Untitled Graph and I say that I want to Create a New Folder then that will be under this in the hierarchy. So you can see that we can, created this nested structures. If I click on this and say New Graph, you can see that we can continue to build these nested structures where we just twirl things open and we can have these as organized in whatever way that works for us. And that's a very, very important function of these Packages. Now in addition to that, we can also do something called Explore, so if I come over here to Advanced Filters, Context Click on this and then say Explore, what that'll do is, it will launch a new tab and then within that tab, the only thing that I'm exploring is the Advanced Filters Package. So here I'm looking at the Bitmap to Material, like so, you can see I'm looking at those parameters, if I come back over here to Packages, I can click on my Untitled Graph. I've got Untitled Graph, if I switch back and forth, you'll see that, that information is in fact, able to be moved back and forth with these tabs, which is a very nice thing. Because there will be times when you want to be in and out of certain folders, but at the same time you don't want to lose where you are over here and it can be a kind of a bear to scroll up and down through a lot of information. Because when you start opening these guys up, you can see that you can get quite a lot of information and then it becomes this bear of scrolling up and down. So I, I prefer instead to use that Explorer Option, use another Tab and then I can just say over here for my Bitmap to Material, just drag that right into my graph, like so. So I'll just drag that in and boom, there it is in my graph. Over here I'm still working in my Untitled Graph so everything is good. If I wanted to grab one of these others, like say Light and Cancel, I could drag that in like so and you could see I'm still over here with my Package. Now when we're done with say our Advanced Filters, we just click that little X and boom, that tab is gone. So the Explore Option is actually a very handy Advance Function of working with the User Interface here, particularly when it comes to our Packages. Now that we understand the basics of working with Packages, I want to come down here and I want to look at our Gallery because this is directly related to our Packages. So we needed to understand Packages before we understood Gallery.
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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