From the course: Substance Designer 2018 Essential Training

Navigating and using the Graph view - Substance Designer Tutorial

From the course: Substance Designer 2018 Essential Training

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Navigating and using the Graph view

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- [Instructor] As the graph view is an area of the Substance Designer UI that we are likely to (laughing) spend quite a bit of time in, knowing how to both get around and make best use of it is going to be a pretty important part of our texturing workflow. For instance, there are a few common navigation tasks that we will need to learn, such as how to truck or move the graph view from side to side, and to accomplish this, we need to hold down our middle mouse button and then drag, which as you can see, gives us the ability to move across the graph area. We can also use the scroll wheel on the mouse, if we have one, that is, to dolly both in, by rolling the wheel forwards, and out, by rolling the wheel backwards. We also have several UI controls that can help us navigate and get the best out of the graph view, so, for example, we can use the one to one button to set our graph to what other applications might call a 100% zoom level. If the current focus level of the view is too far out, then, and we want to quickly get close in to our nodes so as to be able to see them, and read their input and output names, then we can use this to instantly set our graph to its default zoom level which in most cases will make everything look plenty big. If we want a faster way of getting around the view, then with nothing selected in the graph, hit the focus selection slash view button, found at the top of the view, right next to the one to one button, or, we could simply hit the F key to perform the same operation, and because we have nothing selected in the graph, we simply focus in or out on everything. Essentially, they fit all function. Now, if we instead click on a frame to select it, and then press the F key or use the focus button, then we will focus in on just that frame. Indeed, we can even select just a single node in the graph if we want, and press the F key or the focus button to zoom in on just that one node. Again, let's de-select everything and press F, to focus the entire graph. We also have some handy alignment tools available, accessed via the Python script toggle, meaning we can select a number of nodes in the graph and then quickly align them either horizontally or vertically, or, if we select all of the nodes in the graph, we can click the snap selected to grid button and have this shift all of our nodes so that they align with the points on the grid. Now, this can really help us out when moving around our graph, as everything will be laid out in an organized manner. Being able to navigate and use the graph view, then, via the controls that we have looked at here, while seeming like an obvious and simple task to some, is for new users an essential piece of information to know, given that getting around this view really does need to become second nature to us.

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