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Docks | Substance Player

Last updated on May 24, 2023

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Docks

Most of Substance Player's interface is divided into three large areas, called "Panes". These are the 2D View Pane, 3D View Pane, and the Parameters Pane.

You can drag the dividers between the panes to resize them. You can also tear out a Pane and reposition it to a completely different location by dragging on its title bar.

2D View

This is where you can view your Substance's individual channel outputs in detail.

This area displays all the Outputs (also known as "Channels") supported by the Substance. Click on the name to display that Output in the main 2D View area.

The rightmost area of the toolbar also lets you change the zoom level:

Finally, the toolbar offers a menu of options for the 2D View:

Display alpha channel: Toggles displaying of the alpha channel in the 2D View.

Freeze view: Locks the view. Until the view is unlocked, changes made to Substance graph parameters in the Parameters dock will not be shown;

HQ Zoom: Selects/deselects a high-quality zoom mode. HQ Zoom can slow down performance, but can make it easier to spot smaller detail problems;

Save as bitmap...: Lets you export the current image in the 2D View to one of a number of popular bitmap formats;

Copy to clipboard: Copies the 2D view image to the clipboard, for pasting into another application;

Split vertically: Splits the 2D View pane into two fully independent views vertically;

Split horizontally: As above, but splits the 2D View pane horizontally.

Close view: Closes the 2D View. If multiple 2D Views are displayed, only the active 2D View is closed. Any remaining 2D Views are automatically resized to fill the space used by the closed View.

3D View

Lets you view your Substance rendered onto a 3D model. Substance Player includes a number of basic primitives, such as spheres and boxes, but it also supports opening arbitrary models in FBX, 3ds, DXF, DAE, and OBJ formats.

You can also select a shader to use, as well as modify its settings in the Parameters Pane.

Menu bar

This area contains a number of menus for adjusting the 3D View to your needs:

Lets you choose from one of the built-in primitive models, and load a custom mesh. You can also reload a custom mesh if you have just modified it in another package; this will update the 3D View to reflect the changes.

Lets you select one of the five built-in shaders (Blinn, Displacement [NVidia only], Lambert, Parallax Material, and Relief Material.) The default shader is "Relief Material".

This menu also includes options to load your own custom shader and modify its settings. Clicking the Shader menu title itself will display the current shader's settings to the right of the 3D View, as shown below.

As with the Scene menu, you also have the option to reload a shader if it has been modified in another application. This will update the 3D View accordingly.

Lets you reset the light.

Substance Player supports a single light, the settings for which are defined by the shader.

You can move the light around by holding down the [SHIFT] key and dragging the light with the left mouse button.

Lets you set the view to a preset camera position: perspective, top, bottom, front, back, right, and left. You can also choose to render the model in Orthographic mode, or reset the perspective camera to its default position.

Lets you enable or disable "helper" features, including the grid, axes, bounding boxes, select wireframe mode, view the light, and change the background color.

Graph information

This displays information about the currently active graph. Some Substance packages can contain multiple graphs, so this makes it clear which one you are looking at.

Parameters

Substance graphs support real-time parameter modifications, and the Parameters dock is where you can review and modify them.

Parameters are displayed in the main area, with Base parameters listed at the top. Use the sliders, wheels and other controls to modify each parameter as desired. The results will be rendered in the 2D View and 3D View docks.

Parameters toolbar

This set of icons lets you analyze a Substance's performance by freezing or caching specific Parameters, or optimize its rendering by setting caching hints that can be accessed by the Substance rendering engine in another application, such as Unity:

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