Appearance workspace | Substance 3D Viewer

Appearance workspace

The Appearance workspace allows you to edit or change the appearance and materials applied to your 3D model.

You can access the Appearance workspace with the button in the workspace navigation on the left side of the Viewer window.

What is a material?

A material is a type of 3D asset that controls the appearance of a 3D model. It defines whether a surface is rough and matte or smooth and glossy, whether it is metallic, translucent, or soft, and also the various colors that make up it's physical surface.

There are two types of materials, standalone materials and object-specific materials.

Standalone materials usually represent a single surface like wood, metal, plastic, and glass, and are designed to be assigned to specific sub-parts of models. You'll find several of these types of materials in Viewer's material preset library.

Object specific materials are usually crafted for one model in particular and have details that conform to specific shapes. You may import a model that already comes with materials, and these materials usually cannot be reused on other objects and may have multiple parts and appearances merged into one material. These materials usually cannot be assigned to other objects.

The material list

When you first open the Appearance workspace, you’ll see a list of all the materials in your scene. These materials are applied to various parts of your current model, and each of them can have their appearance modified independently. You can expand any material to see and change its properties.

Alternatively, you can also click on any part of your 3D model in the 3D view to filter and see only the materials currently applied to that part.

To modify the appearance of a part, select the part in the 3D view. It will be highlighted in blue and show only the materials applied to that selection.

Material presets library

At the bottom of the Appearance panel, the Material presets button allows you to open the Material presets library. These materials can be dragged and dropped on any part of your model in the Viewport.

Material presets override the default material properties with a dedicated set of properties created specifically for this preset. You will notice that the material icon also changes from a sphere to a “S”, indicating that this material’s properties are now driven by a “Substance material”.

Material properties

Once you’ve selected a material to modify, you’ll be able to adjust its various properties. Substance 3D Viewer supports 3 material types:

Adobe Standard Materials

Adobe Standard Materials are made up of a collection of channels. Each channel changes how a specific property of the material behaves. For example, the Roughness channel can make an object appear smooth and shiny, or rough and matte.

Most channels can be set to either use a single uniform color or an image (also known as a texture or map). Using textures require the model to have UVs (learn more about UVs here)

Channels

Adobe Standard Material (ASM) uses many different channels to display advanced materials behaviors like translucency, light scattering, coating, etc. You can find a reference of all available channels and their effect on materials on our ASM specification page.

Switching between colors and images

Many channels allow you to either use a single color or use an image to add more detail to your model. Click the thumbnail next to a channel to change its value.

In the image above, the image picker is open for the base color channel. From here, it’s possible to delete the image currently being used in the base color channel, open another image to use instead, or switch to the Color tab to select a flat color.

Here, we’ve switched to the Color tab and applied a red color.

Substance Materials

Substance materials are specialized and customizable materials created using Adobe Substance 3D Designer. Substance materials use the SBSAR file extension and are compatible with most 3D applications. They allow to apply complex looks and effects to 3D models without the complexity of creating materials from scratch.

You can find many more Substance materials on the Substance 3D Assets platform.

Resolution

Substance materials generate textures at a specific resolution (2048 px by default). You can choose to use a lower resolution to free up memory and speed up material editing, or a higher resolution for cripser details.

Preset

Each Substance material comes with a set of presets. Each preset changes the Substance parameters to generate a specific look. Each parameter can then be further tweaked manually if needed.

Transform

Transform settings allow you to scale, offset or rotate the material to match the scale or orientation of your 3D model.

Substance Parameters

Each Substance material comes with a set of parameters designed specifically for this material. Experiment with the various sliders and colors to create an infinity of styles and looks from a single material.

Technical Parameters

Technical parameters are available for all Substance materials and allow to change the overall look of the material, by adjusting the color or the intensity of the normal map.

MaterialX

MaterialX is an open standard for representing rich material content in computer graphics. Originally developed by Industrial Light & Magic since 2012, it now benefits from wide adoption by many software and media companies including Adobe, Apple, Pixar or Autodesk.

MaterialX allows users to share consistent looks and materials from one software package to another. Each MaterialX can have its own set of parameters.