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Substance Designer Artist Docs

AYON global tools

Working with AYON in Substance Designer

The Substance Designer AYON integration allows you to:

  • Easily export your textures/sbsar as versioned publishes for others to load and update.
  • Easily load your textures into resource folders in your package project and use those in your Substance Graphs.

Setting up the project

You need to set up your graph and package prior to the use of the AYON plugins

The current workflow of AYON depends on the package of the Substance graph you are opening and the graph itself. E.g. If you want to publish textures of the Substance graph BrickMoss, you need to open the BrickMoss graph and create textures instance, the related data would be embed into the package of which the graph inherits from.

note

Make sure you dont remove ayon-related data in the metadata, otherwise you would lose all information for either loading or publishing through AYON.

AYON SD Metadata

Project creation

You can preset the template you want to use with AYON settings by accessing ayon+settings://substancedesigner/project_creation/project_templates You fill your graph name in the blank(the red sequared in the screenshot below) and select your template type.

Project Creation

If you choose Custom Template as template type, you need to fill in the filepath of substance file and the name of graph in the sbs file you want to use as template. e.g. If you want to add the graph metallic_roughness_sss from the substance file D:\test_pbr_template.sbs as template for your project creation, you can just fill Path to Custom Template as D:\test_pbr_template.sbs and Custom Template Graph Name as metallic_roughness_sss. You can take reference from the screenshot below.

Custom Template Project Creation

note

Once the project is created with the template(s), there would be temp_ayon_package.sbs saved as the local temp file. You need to make sure you use 'Work Files' tool to save the files otherwise your working data inside temp_ayon_package.sbs would be gone if closing the 'Substance Designer' application.

Loading Textures

Users can go to AYON -> Load and load texture to the resources folder (with {project_name}_resources) of the package. Users can choose whether they want to link or import resources by clicking the small memo (See the red framed of the screenshot below) before importing the texture

Texture Loader

Texture Loader Embedded options

Setting Version for the loaded textures

Users can go to AYON -> Manage and manage the version of the loaded version. If you want to update the loaded texture to the latest version, it will load the texture with the latest version into the resources folder.

Publishing Textures

Users must open the graph(s) inherited from the package they intend to publish, and go to AYON -> Create to create texture instance.

Users can define which graphs and its output(s) they want to export.

Publishing Texture Options

The Texture Set instance generates a publish per output map per graph that is defined in the Substance Designer's template during project creation. When publishing default Substance Designer's PBR template with variant Main six instances will be published with the variants:

  • Main.basecolor
  • Main.normal
  • Main.roughness
  • Main.metallic
  • Main.height
  • Main.ambientocclusion The bold output map name for the publish is based on the string that is pulled from the default pattern set in export presets. So $(graph)_$(identifier) becomes basecolor.

Publishing Sbsar

Users must open the graph(s) inherited from the package they want to publish, and go to AYON -> Create to create Sbsar instance. Once the user hits Publish, it publishes the sbsar to AYON.

Known issues

Texture Loader Embedded options

Can't see the AYON menu?

If you're unable to see the AYON top level menu in Substance Designer make sure you have launched Substance Designer through AYON and that the AYON Integration plug-in is loaded inside Substance Designer: Tools > Plugins_Manager > ayon_plugin

Substance Designer + Steam

Running the steam version of Substance Designer within AYON will require you to close the Steam executable before launching Substance Designer through AYON. Otherwise the Substance Designer process is launched using Steam's existing environment and thus will not be able to pick up the pipeline integration.

This appears to be a limitation of how Steam works.