Substance Designer 2.1 Tutorials
Welcome / Working in the Graph
Subtitles of the Movie (Substance Designer 2.1 / Welcome / Working in the Graph)
So in this video we're going to be looking at how to Navigate our Graphs. And this is a very, very critical skill when we're working in Substance Designer because graphs are really the heart of how Substance Designer works and successfully navigating is really a key to your productivity. So we're going to look at several different ways that we can navigate and how we can combine these different tools to make it easier to find what you're looking for in a fairly complex graph. So to begin with I want to make sure that we all have the same thing open, so make sure that you go to Templates, Templates, Sample Materials and double click on Rattan and to open up the Rattan Graph. Now what I want to do is I want to point out to you first of all how you zoom in and zoom out. Where your mouse cursor is, is going to be very important as to where you are zooming in and out. So if I come over here and I hover over this node and then I begin to zoom in and zoom out, you can see that I'm going to that particular point in the graph. If I come over here and I start to zoom in and out, I'm going to that particular point in the graph, so where your mouse cursor is has a big impact on what's actually going on with your zoom. Now in addition to that if we zoom into a spot and we're not exactly where we want to be, what we can do is, we can use the middle mouse button to go ahead and grab and scroll through this document like so. So this can be a very powerful way of getting through your document, by panning using this Grabber Tool from your middle mouse button and I do like to use that. Now we have a Drop Down List here and if we look at the Drop Down List, you can see that we have Fit in View, so if I go ahead and turn on Fit in View, you can see that we're seeing the entire graph. If we come over here and we say Zoom One to One, that's going to give us right up to the actual nodes themselves at one to one zoom so that we can see everything nice and close like so. And I'm going to come back to Fit in View and finally I want to come down here to our Navigator. Now the Navigator is actually going to open up a completely separate window and I'll just go ahead and scroll these down so that we can really see what's going on here. If I come back up here and I say Zoom One to One, I'm seeing a Zoom One to One to see all my nodes up close. However, what I'm seeing here in the Navigator is this little tiny blue box and this blue box is allowing me to move quickly throughout this entire graph by simply dragging the blue box. So I can move to wherever I need to and see whatever I want to at a full zoom by using the Navigator. Now the down side of the Navigator is that it does take up a little bit of screen real estate but the upside is you don't have to zoom in and out, you don't really have to pan, you can simply just grab the blue box and move it wherever you want. And I do happen to like to work this way a lot of the time, now if we don't want that, we can close that. In addition to that we do have the option of using the Node Finder Tool, however this is going to get into working with various different Node Types and we're not really ready to look at Node Types yet. So I'm going to go ahead and close that out and come back to that another time. Now in addition to that, I do want to point out here that we do have right now enabled Display Connector Name. Now what that basically means is that when we hover a node, like this node for instance, we're going to see the different Connector Names. So we got Foreground, Background, Opacity and Output and this is very useful if you're new to Substance Designer. Because you may not remember specifically what these various different inputs and outputs are for, so having that availability is very nice. If you turn this Connector Name off like so, you can see I'm hovering and nothing's happening. So generally I do recommend that you have that Display Connector Name on so that you can see precisely what it is that you need to do as far as your inputs and your outputs for any given node. Now I'm going to come back over here and I'm going to say Fit in View like so and I'm going to go ahead and scroll this guy back up. Because generally speaking that's how you're probably going to want to work most of the time is, is like this, seeing this. If you prefer to have the Navigator open, you can, I'm not telling you not to, I'm just saying that it might be best if you have more screen real estate than I currently have when you're using the Navigator. I'm going to be using the Zoom and Pan Functions that I've just shown you by using the mouse cursor pointing where I want it to be, zooming in and out and then panning to a particular location. Because that's going to be the form of navigation that's going to work best for me while I'm working with these graphs. But you can use the Navigator by all means, feel free. Now in addition to that, we do have the option of making this Persistent and if we go ahead and click that thumb tack to make it Persistent, the advantage here is that now, if we go ahead and open up another graph, like say this Snow Graph, we'll get both these graphs open at the same time. And what that means is, is that we can copy and paste between these two graphs very quickly and easily. Now if I do not have Persistent turned on and I close out Snow and I double-click Snow to open it again, you'll see that Snow replaces Rattan. So having that Persistent Option just allows us to have multiple different graphs open, I'll go ahead and make this Persistent and we'll go ahead and open the Rough as well, like so. And you can see that now we're able to switch back and forth between these graphs, very quickly and easily and copy and paste bits and pieces as we need them. So this can be a very, very useful tool, remember that Persistent Function because it can really change the way that you're working within the User Interface for Substance Designer.
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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