Nodes and graphs - Substance Designer Tutorial

- Now let's do a quick overview of the nodes and graphs. So continuing on our refresher, let's explore what a node is. So basically, Substance Designer works with all these nodes. So whenever you input a node into your graph, you are going to impact the material. So I have a gradient map here and I'm actually impacting the next stage. So every node that is connected to another node impacts that second node. So if you have four nodes, the first one and let's just add four just to show an examples, I'm going to add a blur and then I'm going to add a sharpen. So each node impacts the next one in line so this final node is the result of all these other nodes So whenever you add a node, you have an input and then you have an output so if we basically click on this guy here, I have a line that allows me to take the output and then input it into another input like so. So if I delete this guy here now I just broke the chain So right now this output or basically result of this node is just by itself. So in order to get the result of these three into this guy, I need to connect them with the same line that we had originally like so So I take the output of the directional blur put it into the blur in the input and so on and so forth like so. And now the result is back on so we have all these three nodes impacting this node. And this is pretty much how you would build a graph and you would create materials inside of Substance Designer. As you add more nodes, the result of your 2D view is whatever is the result of that node. So if you want to see what it looks like here, you click here and you're going to see your 2D view. The actual result of your 3D mesh is when you input the base material and then you apply it to the mesh. So right now if we were to click here, we would only see the result of those four nodes inside of that 2D view but you wouldn't see that in the 3D mesh unless you create a base material and then you drag and drop into the base material which we'll do soon. One more thing about nodes is you can actually have more lines that comes from the output and goes into other nodes. So let's just back up a little bit out of there. And let's just place these nodes above. You can create another node... Let's put in HSl and let's make sure it doesn't connect automatically here and put this guy and then grab this output, put it here, and then mesh it back at the end So we can have a blend that would blend these three nodes into whatever I'm putting here make it blend, and then continue our chain. Now the last thing you need to understand to really understand how Substance Designer is structured is this entire graph is a node itself. So if we look at the explorer here, you have a graph. This entire section here is this graph. But this is a node so we can use the combination of all these nodes which is the graph, and add it to another graph. So, for example, if we add a second graph here. So let's go ahead and create a second graph. So I'm going to create a second one very quickly. I have two graphs so basically what I could do if I wanted to... And let's just go back to this guy So whatever is the result of this graph, could be added to another graph. So in this entire Substance Designer package, we could have multiple graphs or just one. So if you have, for example, some kind of a tree or grass that you've been working on into a graph, so you can basically put these into your last graph. So you can have this graph feeding into this node here and then it would impact everything else. So as you can see, Substance Designer is very powerful and very flexible to fit your needs. So this was an overview of nodes and graphs. Let's move on.