Substance Designer

Substance Designer is a Material Authoring and Scan Processing software. It generates textures from procedural patterns or by manipulating bitmaps inside a node graph.

This documentation is designed to help you learn how to use Substance Designer, from basic to advanced techniques.

If you have any question that is not answered in this manual feel free to ask on our Forum. You can also download our Physically Based Rendering guide if you wish to learn more about PBR.

Getting Started

Activation & Licenses — If this is the first time you launch Designer, you might want to activate it and setup your licenses.
Substance Designer Overview — This page gives an overview of Substance Designer, how it compares to our other applications and what sort of filetypes and resources you will work with.
Workflow Overview — This page explains the concept of Node-Based workflows, and provides a summary of the 3 main types of Graph you can author in Substance Designer.
Shortcuts — On this page you can find an overview of all shortcuts for Substance Designer.
Tutorials & Learning — If you prefer to dive in with videos and other more focused learning material, these tutorials are good for getting started:
Technical Requirements — This page lists system requirements and hardware compatibility information.

The Interface

Nodes Reference

Atomic Nodes — Atomic Nodes are the lowest-level most basic building blocks of Substance Designer.
Node Library — This area of the documentation documents and explains all Library nodes
Function Nodes Reference — Lists all basic Function nodes used in the Function Graph
Graph Items — Graph Items are special elements that help you organize and shape your graphs

Substance Graphs

Pipeline and Project Configuration

Release Notes