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.

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:

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: