Shader View Add-on

Shader View – A Smarter Way to Preview Your Nodes

Tired of endless switching nodes to the material output just to check their effect? Shader View simplifies your workflow by displaying real-time output previews directly above each node, making shader creation faster, efficient and more intuitive.

👉 You can now join me on Discord! I’ll be sharing behind-the-scenes progress on upcoming add-ons, shader tricks, and exclusive promos — just for the community. Don’t miss out!

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Navigating shader trees can be frustrating, especially with complex materials. Instead of manually switching nodes to the material output, Shader View provides instant previews for all nodes in your material.

✨ Optimized for performance – designed to handle large shader trees smoothly.

✨ Customizable settings – adjust each node preview independently to fit your workflow.

✨ Intelligent – prevents node previews overlap, keeping the node editor clean and organized.

Seamless & Fast – Even on Big Node Trees

Shader View is designed for optimal performance, even on low-end machines. It processes node output previews in the background process, ensuring smooth workflow and real-time updates. Instead of updating all nodes at once, the add-on chunks the node tree, allowing you to balance speed and performance to match your needs.

Tune Performance in Add-on Settings:

• Render Window – controls how many nodes are processed per batch.
• Update Threshold – adjusts tree update frequency (default: 0.1s, lower = faster, less lags; higher = less CPU usage).

Enhanced Node Scalar Previews – Debug with Precision

Shader View Pro goes beyond just visual previews — it provides precise numerical insights into your node shader calculations. No more guesswork when dealing with clamped values or invisible data ranges!

Scalar Features (Pro Version Only):

🔹 Real Value Display – Unlike the standard preview, which may clamp values, ShaderView now shows the actual scalar values processed by each node. This is crucial for debugging shader logic, ensuring accuracy in procedural materials, and preventing unexpected behavior due to clamping.

🔹 Scalar Grid Preview – Understand how values distribute across your node output. Extra new color-coded grid visually distinguishes values:

• Red shades highlight areas above 1.0, making it easier to spot overexposed areas.
• Blue shades reveal negative values, which are always invisible in standard previews.
• Gradient transitions help analyze smooth value changes and detect issues in logic.

🔹 Min/Max Value Display – Instantly see the min/max of full range of values used in any node output. This is especially useful when working with height maps, bump maps, and displacement shaders, where precision is key.

🔹 Scalar Preview Modes for 3-Channel Sockets – When working with vector or color output sockets, you can now switch between different visualization modes:

• Lume Mode (Luminance): General vector preview.
• Vector Length Mode: Shows the magnitude of a vector, helpful for debugging displacement and normal adjustments.
• Normal Dot Mode: Calculates the dot product between the node output vector and geometry normal, essential for analyzing surface shading and normal-related effects.

Why This Matters

When working with procedural textures, displacement maps, or mathematical shaders, understanding the actual values behind the visuals is essential. ShaderView now will gives you full transparency over what each node is processing, allowing you to:

✔️ Debug shaders with precision by detecting unintended clamping or missing detail.

✔️ Improve procedural material accuracy by knowing the exact value distribution.

✔️ Quickly identify and adjust problematic areas in texture-based calculations.

New Features & Lifetime Support

Shader View Pro will keep evolving with new features to make working in the Shader Editor easier and smoother. Each update enhances your workflow, boosts performance, and adds powerful new tools.

Smart Preview – Keep Your Node Editor Clean and Organized

In Blender, post-process drawing (POST_PIXEL) is the only way to overlay custom visuals in the Shader Editor. This often leads to issues where previews overlap with other nodes, making the node tree messy and harder to navigate.

Shader View Pro solves this by intelligently managing preview placement, preserving the original "z-order" of nodes while also masking previews to prevent them from overlapping other nodes. This keeps previews visible without obstructing node connections or UI elements, ensuring a cleaner and more structured node editor.

(left) Turn ON. (right) Turn OFF

Set It Up Your Way (for both the Standard and Pro versions).

Everyone’s workflow is different. Shader View gives you full control over how previews are displayed. With per-node customizable settings, you can adjust each preview independently, ensuring the add-on works exactly the way you need it to.

New Features: (left) Toggle between color previews and raw scalar values for nodes with value outputs. Applies to nodes like Math, Clamp, Map Range, Float Curve, Vector Math, Separate XYZ, and Layer Weight, giving you better control over data visualization. Since v1.0.12. (right) Vector Splitting – Enables separate previews for RGB/XYZ components instead of displaying the full vector. This provides clearer visualization of vector data by allowing each channel to be viewed independently. Since v1.0.18

(left) Choose the output socket you want to render; the selected socket will be highlighted. (right) Customize the preview size of each node preview for better visibility.

(left) Zoom in or out of node previews to focus on details. (right) Increase preview resolution for sharper details

(left) Switch between Plane and Sphere for preview rendering. (right) Select the camera type to see how your shader looks in perspective or orthographic views for more precise adjustments

Additionally, you can adjust the render sample count, switch between EEVEE and Cycles render engines, and toggle the lighting mode — especially useful when working with normal maps. All these settings can be customized independently for each node in your shader tree.

Key Features

✅ Real-Time Updates – edited nodes update instantly.

✅ Automatic Sync – update all connected nodes automatically.

✅ Background Process – render previews in the background to keeps Blender’s interface and workflow smooth and responsive.

✅ Non-Destructive – makes no changes to your .blend file, so others can open it without this add-on.

Who Is This For?

Anyone Working with Shaders – if you use Blender's Node Editor, this add-on will make your life easier!

Stop wasting time flipping between nodes and material output — get Shader View today and speed up your workflow today! 🚀

Important Notes:

• The add-on runs a background process for rendering previews, and by default, it uses EEVEE. However, on macOS, initializing an EEVEE environment requires launching a separate Blender instance, which causes the extra bouncing app icon. Since version 1.0.18, you can switch the default render engine to Cycles in the add-on settings. Choosing Cycles prevents the extra Blender window from appearing but may slow down preview rendering. To apply the changes, you will need to restart the Blender. (Pro version only)
• The add-on has a mechanism to restart the background process if it exceeds the time limit set in the settings. If you're using very complex materials, consider increasing the default Render Threshold from 3.0 to a higher value. (Pro version only)
• Since the add-on release, many bugs have been fixed, but some may still be undiscovered. If you encounter any issues, feel free to contact me on Twitter or via email shadererror.dll@gmail.com, and I'll do my best to fix them as soon as possible.

Changelog:

v 1.0.21-25 (March 18)

• Improved update and rendering process with new batching logic, enhancing performance and stability.
• Extended scalar preview functionality (originally introduced in v1.0.12) from a single result to full texture previews using a grid display.
• Added min/max scalar value display for textures.
• Added UDIM texture tile switching for previews.
• Fixed various bugs and stability issues.

v 1.0.20 (25 of Feb)

Fixed bug that caused the add-on to stop working when other add-ons added custom attributes to shader nodes.

New Feature: Added mouse controls:

• Shift + Drag to move a zoomed texture.
• Double Click to switch channel preview for split vectors.

v 1.0.18

New Features: 

• Add global settings for preview size, render engine, and resolution - now can adjust it for all nodes at once.   
• Add new feature: Vector Splitting, enables preview of RGB/XYZ components separately

v 1.0.17

• Made the math scalar preview encoder more efficient
• Added 'render_threshold' in preferences. This sets how long (in seconds) to wait before deciding the render is stuck and restarting the background process. For large or complex node groups, consider increasing this value.
• Updated the add-on's restart logic when 'render_threshold' is exceeded to prevent malfunctions.

v 1.0.15

• Resolved an issue where node preview of complex shader node trees rendered as gray color due to the background process not updating the scene in time before rendering.

v1.0.13

• Resolved an issue where packed images did not update correctly when changing materials.
• Fixed a bug that prevented UDIM tiled textures from functioning properly.

v1.0.12

New Feature: Added functionality to toggle display modes for nodes with value output sockets, allowing users to switch between color previews and actual scalar values. This applies to nodes such as: Math, Clamp, Map Range, Float Curve, Vector Math, Separate XYZ, Layer Weight

Bug Fixes:

• Resolved an issue where multiple chained reroute nodes could lead to incorrect updates in the node tree.
• Fixed a bug causing the add-on to stop functioning after registering/unregistering on Windows systems.
• Addressed a timing issue where the background process environment didn't update promptly, resulting in gray color previews.

v 1.0.11

• Fixed bug where the Texture Node (and all connected nodes) failed to render previews due to malformed paths on Windows.

v. 1.0.10

• Completely reworked the logic for handling rendered previews. Instead of loading images, it now converts them into NumPy arrays and then into textures. This fixes a bug where loading images inside a restricted handler could break the add-on, especially when other add-ons also manipulate bpy.data in the .blend file.
• Overhauled the communication system between the background process and the main process. Since we’re now handling large NumPy arrays, subprocess.PIPE was no longer efficient and has been replaced with multiprocessing.connection.
• Both changes significantly improve performance. 🚀

v 1.0.9

• Refactored code to significantly improve performance by reducing unnecessary node updates and preview renders, while adding extra logic optimizations.
• Fixed preview update issue where update_threshold caused outdated final previews in some cases.
• Fixed denoiser setting bug that was leading to rendering errors.
• Fixed socket selection issue when changing node types, ensuring correct socket selection.
• Improved color space handling for math nodes and related nodes to provide a more intuitive result representation.
• Fixed a logic typo that caused Value Node changes to be ignored.
• Fixed a crash issue that occurred when reading certain node attributes in specific cases.
• Added support for rendering previews across multiple editor windows, allowing Shader View Add-on use in different layouts.

v 1.0.8

• Fixed issue where nodes didn't receive values through reroute nodes

v 1.0.7

• Fixed issue with detecting link detachment from a reroute node.
• Fixed a bug where group nodes with multiple input nodes caused errors

v 1.0.6

• Fixed a bug where previews wouldn't render when creating a new group node.
• Fixed highlight positioning on output sockets when manually hiding them.
• Renamed keymap entries to make them easier to find in Blender Preferences —now all names start with "SV".

v1.0.5

• Fixed rendering preview for packed images.
• Fixed a minor bug with script nodes.

v 1.0.4

• Fixed incorrect rendering previews for Group Nodes.
• Improved z-ordering for better layering of Group Nodes.

v 1.0.3

• Fixed the issue causing crashes when deleting active texture nodes.