designer-effects

Designer Effects

Apply procedural effect recipes on top of an existing Designer graph.

Honest capability boundary

Substance 3D Designer has no scene-level effect stack. An "effect" here is a compositing or filter node inserted into the graph topology, created and wired through the adapter's verified create_node and connect_nodes primitives. There is no viewport effect, no post-process pass, and no shader authoring.

This skill is experimental: recipe availability is a runtime property, not a documented guarantee. The 7 effect recipes resolve against the live node-definition inventory at call time, so treat the available flag reported by list_effect_recipes as the only source of truth for whether a recipe exists in the running Designer build. Never assume a recipe name implies a node type.

Recipe discovery instead of hardcoded node types

Node type URLs differ between Designer builds. Each recipe declares an ordered list of candidate URLs and resolves the first one the live node-definition inventory actually advertises.

• Run list_effect_recipes first. It reports every recipe with its resolved type_url and an available flag.
• A recipe that resolves to nothing fails closed with RECIPE_UNAVAILABLE and lists the candidates it tried. Nothing is created in that case.
• apply_effect_chain resolves every step before creating any node, so a missing type cannot leave a partial chain behind. Port lookup, every intermediate connection, the final target connection, and export are all inside one rollback unit: if any of them fails, the nodes created by that call are removed. The same guarantee applies to apply_effect.

Tool notes

• apply_effect inserts one recipe node. Pass target_node and target_property to wire its output onward; omit them to leave the node unwired for manual inspection.
• apply_effect_chain wires source_node.source_property into step 1, then each step into the next, then the last step into the optional target. Ports are resolved by discovery, not by a fixed name: texture-typed ports win, then conventionally named ports (input/output, source, result), then the first available port. Do not assume a literal input or output id.
• Chain length is bounded to 12 steps. spacing spaces nodes horizontally in native graph coordinates from origin.
• Use export_graph_state from designer-session after a chain to verify the resulting topology.