3D View | Substance 3D Designer

The 3D View helps you view and understand your materials with custom meshes and rendered PBR materials.

Like with all Substance 3D Designer Windows, it works together with other windows through right-click menu options and drag-and-drop operations. The 3D view also provides two main methods of rendering: fast, realtime OpenGL visualisation, with fluent smooth interaction, and high-quality raytraced renders with Iray.

In this page

Viewport interactions

The section below explains you how to do common actions in short, along with an animated gif to illustrate the process.

Viewport navigation

The 3D View camera and environment may be manipulated in three ways:

• Orbit: Hold LMB and drag
• Pan: Hold MMB and drag
• Zoom: Scroll using MouseWheel / Hold RMB and drag
• Rotate environment: Hold Ctrl+Shift+RMB and drag

Using a trackpad (macOS only)

• Orbit: Two-finger swipe
• Pan: Two-finger swipe while holding Shift
• Zoom: Two-finger pinch / Two-finger swipe while holding Cmd
• Rotate environment: Two-finger swipe while holding Cmd+Shift

You Focus the view back on your mesh with Hotkey F .

Navigation can also happen by using the Camera menu to jump to predefined viewpoints, see the Toolbar section below.

CHANGING THE LIGHTING

Designer works with Image-Based lighting by default. A high-dynamic range bitmap is used to render diffuse and specular lighting. You can rotate this light-environment around your 3D object, or you can load either preset, or custom HDR light environments. Please note that your HDR images need to be spherical layout, and ideally are 32-bit .hdr format.

To rotate the environment in the 3D view, hold Ctrl + Shift + RMB and drag from left to right.

To set a precise rotation, use Environment > Edit in the top 3D View toolbar and change the Rotation Angle slider in the properties window.

To use a preset HDR light environment, click the HDRI Environments section of the 3D View category in the Library Window, and then drag and drop any of the icons to the 3D view.

To use your own, custom HDR light environment, import an HDR image by dragging and dropping the file into a package in the Explorer Window (Link the file when prompted). Then drag and drop the resource, choose Latitude/Longtitude Panorama as the target.

View data in 3D View

Substance graphs

You can view entire materials as a complete material in the 3D View. This is the most common way to work, and will match the usage attributes on output nodes , to the relevant texture slots of the 3D view material. That means your outputs need to be set correctly (using Templates ensures this is the case), and that you selected material/viewport shader supports

You view all of a graph's outputs by clicking RMB an emtpy area in the Graph view, and choosing the View Outputs in 3D View option in the contextual menu.

You can also view a graph's outputs without having to open it, by clicking RMB on a graph resource in the Explorer dock and choosing the View Outputs in 3D View option in the contextual menu.

As an alternative to the graph's contextual menu, you can achieve the same result by dragging the graph from the Explorer dock to the 3D View.

When loading a graph, its outputs are automatically applied in the 3D View by default. You can disable this behaviour in the Preferences. Go to Edit > Preferences > Graph > Common and uncheck the View outputs in 3D view when opening a graph option.

Individual node/graph output

You can view just a single output in any available material channel in the 3D View. This is less commonly used, but good for previewing quick tests or individual nodes with no output.

You can view any node, not just output nodes, by right clicking it in the Graph view, and choosing View in 3D View. You'll be shown a list with available channels to assign the node to. Click any to confirm.

You can also use RMB to drag and drop any node from the Graph view to the 3D View. You'll be shown a list with available channels to assign the node to. Click any to confirm.

You can view any individual graph output by expanding the graph resource in the Explorer dock, and using LMB to drag that output to the 3D View. You will be shown a list with available channels to assign the node to. Click any to confirm.

View (custom) 3D scenes

Designer offers a dozen preset meshes. These meshes have uniform, useable UV coordinates and serve most scenarios for tiling textures. Importing and viewing your own 3D meshes is also possible.

Pick any of the default meshes through the Scene dropdown menu in the top bar.

Import a custom 3D Mesh by dragging and dropping a compatible file to the Explorer. If asked to Link as UDIM mesh, the answer is usually No. Then Double-click its resource entry in the Explorer, or drag it to the 3D View to view it.

Change shader properties

There are a few different shaders available by default in Designer, and each shader has options beyond just texture channels. They can be configured individually. Keep in mind shaders are different between OpenGL and Iray renderers: settings don't always carry over seamlessly.

To change the current shader, go to Materials > Default (or any other slot name for custom meshes) and choose the definition and then technique. For example, to set displacement on a Plane (hi-res): Materials > Default > Adobe Standard Material* > Tesselation. This also opens the settings in the Properties panel.

To access shader properties, go to Materials > Default (or any other slot) > Edit. Then change properties, such as Height Scale, in the properties panel. Other shader settings are described below.

To reset a shader go to Materials > Default (or any other slot) > Reset Material. This will require you to view a Substance graphs' outputs in the 3D view again, as it clears all connected textures.

*: On some system configurations, Adobe Standard Material may not be available and Metallic Roughness should be used instead.

Export scene

You can export the mesh from the 3D View to a file in the OBJ, FBX or PLY formats. If tessellation displacement is enabled, the subdivision of the geometry is baked into the exported mesh.

However, the vertex normals of the original mesh may not match its new displaced shape, which means the displaced mesh may not render correctly. You can manage this in two ways:

• Use the mesh normal map which will provide the correct normals
• Recompute the mesh normals on export using the mesh normal map, which means these normals are baked into the exported mesh and the normal map is no longer necessary

To export the 3D View mesh, go to Scene > Export scene..., set your choice regarding normals recomputation, then select a location, name and file format for the exported mesh.

Menu bar

The menu bar provides 7 menus with options related to the 3D View. below is an overview of all options available.

Scene toolbar

The Scene toolbar, which is located on the left border of the 3D View by default, offers controls for orbiting the cameras or lights around the scene. It also lets you access the Scene Browser dock.

Camera/Light toggle

Scene browser

The Scene browser dock displays a hierachy of all elements in your scene.

As any other dock in Designer, it can be repositioned around the viewport as well as undocked into a floating window.

Selecting a light, camera or the environment item will display its properties in the Properties panel. This may be a convenient way to quickly access these settings instead of having to go through the menu bar.

Materials listed in the Materials menu can be assigned by clicking the dropdown box in the Material column of the Scene Browser.

(OpenGL renderer only) Selecting an element of the scene in the list will replace it in the viewport by a wireframe overlay of that element.

Display options

Click the Show environment button to toggle the display of the scene's environment. The same setting can be found in the Properties dock after going to Environment > Edit in the 3D View's menu bar.

Similarly, click the Display options button to display button toggles equivalents for the settings found in the Display menu.

 Wireframe: Toggles display of the mesh as a wireframe.

 Axis: Toggles display of the 3D axis in the viewport.

 Backface culling: Disabling this option lets you see a mesh face from both sides. The option works in combination with Wireframe.

 Bounding Box: Toggles display of the mesh' bounding box.

 Grid: Toggles the display of the world grid.

 Vertex tangent space: Displays the tangent, binormal and normal vectors for all vertices as colored gizmos.

 Scene Stats: Toggles display of scene statistics, such as polycount, materials count, static meshes count, etc.

Display toolbar

The Display toolbar, which is located at the bottom of the 3D View panel by default, lets you control how the rendered image is displayed in the viewport.

Color channels

You can display a single channel of the image using the Color channels button. This opens a combo box letting you select which of the Red, Green and Blue channels should be displayed. The normal aspect of the image with all channels is restored by selecting the RGB option.

The icon of the Color channels button changes depending on the currently display channel(s).

Color space

For the most accurate representation of color, images are displayed by default in a color space which matches the one used by the monitor.

The available controls will depend on the color management mode set in the Project settings. Learn more about these controls in the Color management section in this page.