Substance Designer

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Substance Designer is a Material Authoring and Scan Processing software. It generates textures from procedural patterns or by manipulating bitmaps inside a node graph.

Discussions and workflow about Substance Designer. 13217 Posts 3658 Topics Last post by thesnowdog1971 in Re: Opengl or DirectX No. On Today at 05:12:54 am. CREATING BEAUTIFUL MATERIALS WITH SUBSTANCE DESIGNER Adam Dudley talked about how he builds his beautiful materials using Substance Designer for AAA games and shares some workflow tips for building materials. Design your parametric material: for your pipeline and for your technical exploration. Substance Designer’s power will push your materials to the next level. Your high-end material library The widest collection of expert-made materials optimized for any workflow.

This documentation is designed to help you learn how to use Substance Designer, from basic to advanced techniques.

If you have any question that is not answered in this manual feel free to ask on our Forum. You can also download our Physically Based Rendering guide if you wish to learn more about PBR.

  • Activation & Licenses — If this is the first time you launch Designer, you might want to activate it and setup your licenses.
  • Substance Designer Overview — This page gives an overview of Substance Designer, how it compares to our other applications 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 Substance Designer.
  • Shortcuts — On this page you can find an overview of all shortcuts for Substance Designer.
  • Tutorials & Learning — If you prefer to dive in with videos and other more focused learning material, these tutorials are good for getting started:
  • Technical Requirements — This page lists system requirements and hardware compatibility information.
  • Atomic Nodes — Atomic Nodes are the lowest-level most basic building blocks of Substance Designer.
  • Node Library — This area of the documentation documents and explains all Library nodes
  • Function Nodes Reference — Lists all basic Function nodes used in the Function Graph
  • Graph Items — Graph Items are special elements that help you organize and shape your graphs


Recently, I had the chance to test the new Python API update. It is definitely an upgrade — and a big one!

The first thing I noticed is that most of the classes and methods are still the same, so a lot of the existing code will remain valid.

Substance Designer

But the biggest improvement is how the plugin manager now works: the plugins can finally remain persistent, which means that they are no longer attached to a specific graph or window and can fully interact as a native part of Substance Designer. Also, with the integration of Qt, making a multi-platform user interface is possible (bye-bye Tkinter! :D).

In order to test how well the plugins could be integrated with Substance Designer and how far I would be able to extend its functionality, I searched through the user-voice requests, social network comments, forums, Discord, and more. I found two plugin opportunities to showcase the new API improvements: – Add a shortcut manager for Substance Designer – Add a way to modify multiple nodes simultaneously

The final objectives were to create a relatively simple solution that users with some Python knowledge could implement on their own, and to show how easy it is to improve and speed up your workflow with some coding effort.

Shortcut Manager

The Shortcut Manager (get it on Substance Share) allows the user to set shortcuts for some predefined tasks: export the selected nodes to a default path, add frames with random colors, add comments and set a random value to the seeds of the selected nodes.

Substance Designer

Also, and this is one of my favorites, you can easily add a shortcut to any node you want and even configure the properties of this node! So, if you always wanted to add by default the Transformation 2D node with an absolute inheritance and no tiling, or the Tile Generator with an input image pattern by default, it is now possible.

Substance Designer Vs Painter

With the Multi Node Editor (get it on Substance Share), you can modify common properties of two or more nodes at the same time, including inheritance when it is valid.

Substance Designer Alternative

It is ideal for quick iterations and to update nodes in scenarios in which you don’t necessarily want to bind properties with functions.

Both plugins were made with a similar structure, and all the UI was made with Qt and a dockable window, which makes it fit seamlessly within the rest of the Substance Designer user interface.

Development was fully made with Python and some default configurations saved in a .json file inside the plugin folder. If you are interested by these plugins, you’ll be able to find the source code in Substance Share.

Substance Designer Materials

This new update adds the possibility of creating custom UIs for the plugins you are developing, and it’s working great!

As you can see with the plugin examples I created, you can definitely find ways to improve the user experience and speed up your workflow.

Keep in mind that there are still some limitations, like accessing the 3D view or being able to use the native user controls via Qt, but with each new release, we are getting closer and closer to being able to tune up Substance Designer to our liking.

These updates have added to the current ability for pipeline integrations such as connecting with other software, managing libraries, publishing materials, and so on. It is more than ready to be used!

Substance Designer Stylized Grass

Substance designer vs painter

Substance Designer Free

The new scripting capabilities in Substance Designer are part of the latest release. Check out the release post here, and don’t forget to upgrade your version of Substance Designer! And if you want a simpler way to update your Substance tools and browse content, check out the Launcher – it’s free!