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Interface overview | Substance 3D Viewer

Home screen

When you launch Viewer, the Home screen appears, which includes the following:

  • Information about getting started.
  • Access your recent files and folders.
  • Drag and drop a 3D file to open it.

Select the Home icon in the Header to access the Home screen at any point while working with Viewer.

The Home screen also has buttons on the left:

  • Open a file: Browse to and open a file.
  • Open a folder: Browse to and open a folder. When opening a folder, the first file in the root of that folder will be opened by default
  • Open a file with settings: Modify import settings before opening a file.

Main interface

Substance 3D Viewer separates the interface into a collection of workspaces. Each workspace provides access to different controls and properties that let you change certain aspects of your scene.

The main interface of Substance 3D Viewer is built around the Viewport. The Viewport is where 3D models and scenes are displayed and can be interacted with.

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Workspaces

The left bar lets you access the different workspaces available.

The files workspace icon

The Files workspace lets you browse through 3D models at a chosen folder location.

The appearance workspace icon

The Appearance workspace provides controls to change the materials and appearance of the current 3D model.

The composition workspace icon

With the Composition workspace you can add a background image to your scene and adjust output parameters to composite an image.

The environment workspace icon

The Environment workspace lets you adjust the lighting and background color of your scene.

The generate workspace icon

The Generate workspace provides access to tools that help you create high quality images from your 3D scene, or generate 3D models from text prompts.

Header

The home icon

The Home icon in the top left lets you navigate back to the Home screen.

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The view mode switch allows you to switch between a standard 3D view in which you can freely navigate around your model in 3D space, and a Canvas view.

View controls

The fit to selection icon

“Fit to selection” reframes the object in full frame of the viewport.

The reset icon

“Reset” resets the view to the default ¾ viewpoint.

The view settings icon

“View settings” allows to change view related settings such as the field of view (focal length) or to switch between a perspective or orthographic view projection.

Rendering mode

The ray tracing toggle icon

The Ray tracing button allows you to switch between the default, fast, real-time rendering mode and a slower, but higher quality, ray tracing rendering mode.

While the rendering in real-time is instantaneous, Ray tracing requires time for the light computation to converge. The image will appear noisy at first and get refined over the course of several seconds.

Snapshot

The snapshot feature allows you to quickly export the current view, either as a file on disk or to the clipboard, ready to be pasted in another app.

Image export

The Export an Image button allows you to trigger a high-quality and high-resolution rendering of the current view. The computation will be done in the background, allowing you to keep interacting with the application. These renders can take up to several minutes depending on the complexity of the 3D scene.

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