I present you my first plugin for Adobe Substance 3D Designer: “Print Modified Values”. The purpose of this plugin is to add a Comment, as a “child” of a node, containing the information of those parameters that have been modified.
In February 2023 I will teach a Designer course in my town (I will share more information soon) and in the preparation of the contents for that course I immediately realized how useful this tool would be. I searched and asked around, but found nothing, so I got down to work myself.
After a lot of work, here you have the first version. I hope it will be useful, especially to those of you who like to spread the word by sharing screenshots of your Graphs. It is certainly saving me a lot of work, hopefully more than it has taken me to create it… 🤪 In any case I have learned a lot, not only about Designer API, but also about the internal structure of the application itself.
⬇️ Download “Print Modified Values”
How to install it
Once you have downloaded and unzipped the ZIP file, move the main folder “etr_print_modified_values” (which also contains a .json file and another subfolder folder with the same name) to where you normally have other Designer plugins installed.
If you have never done it I recommend you to use this directory:
/Users/NAME/Documents/Adobe/Adobe Substance 3D Designer/python/sduserplugins/
Then start Designer, open Preferences / Projects, click on the vertical tab “User project” (inside Configuration / Project Files) and then on the horizontal tab Python. Click on the little + icon on the right and add the above directory. And as indicated in yellow, once this is done you will have to restart Designer.
Once Designer is restarted, the plugin should be loaded. But just in case, open Tools / Plugin Manager and check that the checkbox of our plugin is enabled. Doing this, by the way, you can activate or deactivate any plugin.
As soon as you install it, you will not see it appear in your top bar. To do this you must first create a new Substance Graph. Do it. Now you will see 2 new little buttons appear in the toolbar: the one without color can activate or deactivate the presence of the other one, in orange.
How to use it
It is very simple: suppose we have a Splatter Circular node that we have modified and we want to write down what parameters we have changed. We simply select it and click the little orange button. Automatically a Comment node will be added as a “child” of our Splatter (“child” means that when we move the node, the comment is moved with it).
You can also use “Q” as a keyboard shortcut instead of the button, as it is much more agile. I have chosen that letter because it evokes “Query” (ask the node about its own parameters). If you don’t like this shortcut or it conflicts with another one you already have, you can change it by editing the __init__.py file located inside the “print_modified_values” subfolder. But be careful not to touch anything else, if you don’t know what you are doing 😉.
DISCLAIMERS
SHORT: I have done my best to create a stable and robust tool. But use with caution, please. I recommend to create a copy of your graph before proceed to comment your nodes using this tool.
LONG: THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
ETÉREA 