From the course: Substance Designer 2018 Essential Training

The Welcome dialogue - Substance Designer Tutorial

From the course: Substance Designer 2018 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

The Welcome dialogue

“

- [Narrator] When we first boot up the Substance Designer application, one of the first things that we encounter is a welcome dialogue that has collected together several useful options inside two very distinct tabs. Looking inside the Create tab then, we have a list of recently opened Substance files. Although, if this is the first time that we have ever booted up Substance Designer, then this will be just a blank empty space. Having the ability to quickly and easily access current projects that we are working on is always going to be a welcome speed-up. Just to the left of this list, we have the ability to create brand new Substance Designer projects. So, first of all, a completely new Substance package along with it its associated graph layout. We can create a new MDL graph or shader using NVIDIA's Material Definition Language. We can browse file, and open an existing Substance document from any storage drive of our choice, or we can use the AXF import option in order to bring in an appearance exchange file format, which is a vendor-neutral format that enables to communication of all aspects of a physical material's appearance. So color, texture, gloss refraction, translucency, and so on in a single editable file. As we will be looking at creating both new Substance and MDL graphs later on in the course, let's for now move on to what can be found inside the Learn tab. If we click the first option, tutorials, we are taken to the Substance Academy site at tutorials.allegorithmic.com where we find quote a number of videos that can help us get to grips with, and tackle specific challenges in terms of using the designer application. Another resource available form this tab is the online documentation, which when clicked will again take us to the Allegorithmic site where we can search by both application and then by category on the left-hand side of the UI. Now, it is work knowing that most of the controls that we have in the welcome dialogue can also be accessed via the Substance Designer menu. Then so, if we would prefer to work just with those, and so not have to keep closing the dialogue on boot up, we could put a check in the 'Do not display again' box found at the bottom of the screen. Let's go ahead and do that then. Then close the dialogue down. Having checked the box though, we may at some point decide that we would actually like to get the welcome dialogue back again, and so all we need do is come to the Help menu. From the list that we see there, select the Welcome Screen option, and then uncheck the box that tells it not to display again. With the welcome screen closed, let's move on to our next video and take a look at some of the important preference settings that we may want to alter so as to not have to fiddle with them each and every time we boot the Substance Designer application up.

Contents