From the course: Substance Designer 2020 Essential Training

Important Quick Access Toolbar functionality - Substance Designer Tutorial

From the course: Substance Designer 2020 Essential Training

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Important Quick Access Toolbar functionality

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- The Quick Access Toolbar contains a number of tools that we may or may not make good use of depending on how we like to work and the type of projects that we work on. But until we know at least something about the functionality available to us, we can't really make an informed decision. So what are some of the available options that we might want to take advantage of? The first tool we will look at, highlight flow, does pretty much exactly what it says, in that it causes designer to highlight the nodes that are being used prior to the currently selected output. So if we click on one of our blend notes, all the nodes become grayed out. And we see only the nodes that are affecting , are contributing to this nodes output, which can be brilliant for helping us debug complex substances. Moving on to another useful tool. The information drop down, allows us to add extra nodes to our graph nodes such as connecting names. The icon badges that we mentioned early in the course or even the resolution of a particular node. We may though, once we become more familiar with designer, want to turn these off in order to keep our graph clutter free. We can also toggle the parent size toolbar options, which allow us to interactively change the resolution of our substance without any loss of data if we have chosen the relative to parents option. It should be noted though, that whenever we increase or decrease this value, we are not affecting the export resolution of the substance but just the viewing resolution, although this setting will affect the saving of 2D images out of the 2D view. So just bear that in mind. Next, if we just select a number of nodes that we may want to straighten up, we can align them to a vertical or horizontal average so that we can clean up our views a little. Again, this is super helpful on complex flows that might have a lot of nodes that have been quickly and roughly placed down. Speaking of the graph view, you may notice the thick black lines that we see there. Well, we can snap all nodes to these, via the snap nodes on grid option. We can turn this on or off again in the Quick Access Toolbar. We then have the node toolbar, which as we click and drag from the list of icons that we see, gives us a really quick way of adding some common nodes to our flow in as few a number of steps as possible. Now if we hover our mouse over each and wait, we can see what the node icon represents. Though of course, once we become more familiar with which icon represent which node inside the application, we will be able to grab them from this bar with ease making it yet another speed enhancing tool that designer adds to our arsenal. Hopefully then, we now have a good grasp regarding the basics of this Substance Designer UI and how we can use the tools and options that it contains so as to give ourselves a quick and easy workflow with which we can work to create high quality materials for our projects.

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