From the course: Substance Designer 2018 Essential Training

Adjust the UI layout - Substance Designer Tutorial

From the course: Substance Designer 2018 Essential Training

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Adjust the UI layout

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- [Instructor] The layout of the user interface in any piece of software is an aspect of the program that can either speed up or slow down the work that we are able to do inside it. Thankfully, as is the case with all good software these days, Substance Designer gives us the ability to both change and then save the layout of the UI in a way that means we can optimally configure it for the type of work we are currently doing. Indeed, as we look at the UI, you will notice that each of the sections or panes are bounded by a black line, which, if we hover our mouse over, turns into a thicker gray line, indicating that we can now left-click and drag to change the relative size of the panes, although, the change of the cursor to a double-headed arrow is probably an even bigger giveaway as to the existence of that feature. Something else we can do here is reorder where the panes or panels are sitting in the UI, so, if we hold our mouse over one of the header bars where we see the name of the section, and again, left-click and drag, we see as we move the mouse around, that the UI automatically updates, with a box appearing in the various locations to which we move the cursor. Now, the box indicating where the pane will be placed should we let go of the mouse button, which, as you can see, when we do that, places the pane into this new location. We do have another piece of functionality open to us when dragging UI panels around, and one that I think will be very welcome to users who like to maximize the screen real estate space that they have available, which is, if we grab something like the library pane and drag it over to the properties panel, we see the properties pane highlight and a tab appear at the top, and so, if we release the mouse button now, we turn this section of the UI into a sequence of tabbed panels. If we find ourselves using something like the library panel every once in a while, then we may prefer to have it sit inside a set of tabs, and so, leave extra space available for other panels that we use more frequently, such as the 3D or graph views. Of course, this functionality isn't limited to just this area of the UI. We could, for example, drag and drop the 3D view onto the 2D view, which again would create a series of tabs that give us a much bigger viewport with which to work, and we aren't limited to having just two tabs per section, either. If we want to split the tabs out into individual panels again, all we need to do is click and drag on the header so not the tab that sits above it, and as you can see, we are easily able to separate them out. So, now that we know how to customize our UI, we can easily create a custom layout that can help speed up the production pipeline based, of course, on whatever we find ourselves doing the most whilst working inside the designer application.

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