From the course: Substance Designer 2020 Essential Training

Navigating and understanding the library - Substance Designer Tutorial

From the course: Substance Designer 2020 Essential Training

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Navigating and understanding the library

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- The library section of the UI can help us see just what tools we have at our disposal. And also give us an inclination as to how we can start building our materials up. So, how can we use this section to our advantage? Well, coming to the library tab, if needed, we can see that it actually is split into two sections. With the left side, providing a list view that is petitioned into different roll-outs. Now, as we click on these, we see that the right hand side of the UI displays all of the nodes and tools that this particular section contains. Now we can expand the section if needed. Or we can collapse it via the drop down arrow, so as to keep things clutter-free, depending on our personal, our workflow preferences. And that's only can we click on each main section, but we can also click on the subsections in each rollout If we want, in order to get a more complete look at the tools contain there. For example, we can click on the filter section. So as to see all of the nodes that can filter the textures we create or we could click on, let's say the transforms heading to see only nodes that allow us to affect the transforms of our nodes, our data. Now, if we right click on a node in the library, we can also add it to our favorites. Which is another heading in the library that lets us store a number of nodes that we use all the time. There's of course, having the potential to really speed up our workflow. Once we become familiar with designer and the kinds of projects that we will typically use it for. Now to use notes from the library list, we simply click and drag the one that we want to our graph view. And once we release the mouse bottom, we are ready to go. But more on that later. Now, if we know the name of a tool that we've used before, but can't quite remember where it is located, then we can come to the top of the library tab and use the search field. It's good to keep in mind as well that this searches, all categories are not just the one we have selected, meaning we will hopefully never lose any of the nodes that we want to use. If we click on the display icon, which should be represented by a number of squares in its default state, we can change how the nodes and tools are displayed. And so if we find using either a list are smaller icons better for navigation, then we can select those and our library will update accordingly. Indeed. And if we are feeling particularly brave or simply know the tool library in designer really well, well we can even disable the text portion of the list in order to clean up the UI a little more. So, although we will learn of other ways in which we can access the nodes and tools that we see here, some of which we will probably find ourselves using on a daily basis. The library section is still a brilliant way for newer users to get to know the tools and our nodes that we have available. In fact, simply browsing through it in order to learn what the tools are called and which heading they're listed under can be a way to really get ourselves quickly up to speed as it were with the nodes found inside substance designer.

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