Shader Material debugging, without leaving the node editor.
Tired of endlessly re-plugging nodes into the material output just to check their effect? ShaderView shows real-time output previews directly above each node, including histograms, heatmaps, reveal the actual values flowing through your material.
Faster, more efficient, more intuitive.
Version 2.0 is a complete rewrite. It follows Blender’s real dependency graph, handles repeat zones and nested ones and suppots per-instance groups nodes, renders everything in a separate background process so the editor stays responsive.
Open a Shader Editor and it is already there: every node has a live thumbnail that updates as you edit your material. Changes anything inside graph — nodes, reroutes, groups, or copy of a group — and all connected nodes will update automatically.
Per-node overrides for resolution (64–1024 px), samples, engine and preview size — keep defaults light, crank up only the node you're inspecting. One click bakes any node's output to an image. And it's non-destructive: no permanent changes to your .blend — others can open the file without the add-on.
Switch between preview mode. Because a different texture on a different surface can give very different result.
Pure UV / procedural space — the texture exactly as it is baked. Zoom & pan into details.
New in 2.0 Set a tiling as a real 2×2 / 3×3 repetition to help your build a seamsless texture.
A lit shpere, bump and normal work — anything that depends on light or view direction. Orthographic or perspective camera per node.
The real mesh of your object — modifiers applied, scale and rotation respected. See the material on your actual model.
each node will have a virtual camera, drag it right on the thumbnail.
Visual previews are only half the story. ShaderView also gives you precise numerical insight into shader calculations. No more guesswork with clamped values or data ranges that are invisible as colours, every preview store the real float value of your shader node — on the plane, the sphere, or your own mesh.
The exact value under your cursor, live.
Quickly spot values outside the 0–1 range. The preview highlights where values go above 1 or below 0, making it easy to catch problematic outputs in masks, height, bump and displacement data.
Distribution strip with min, max, mean and the percentage of clipped pixels — spot a mask that never reaches 1.0 in a second, crucial for height, bump and displacement maps.
False-colour view (min → max with a legend) that makes subtle ranges visible where a grey preview shows nothing.
Click the preview — the value under the cursor becomes the threshold and its contour line is drawn. Hold and move to scrub the threshold live.
Preview X / Y / Z of a vector separately; reduce vectors and colours to a number by Luma (luminance), Vector Length (great for displacement / normal debugging) or Normal Dot (shading analysis).
See the exact coordinates your shader is using, after Mapping, warping and other transformations — directly on the node, with your material still fully connected.
A grid driven by this node's output as a coordinate — after every Mapping, warp and piece of vector math.
Color Grid or plain squares. Rotation and mirroring stay visible; a symmetric checker hides both.
The evaluated mesh flattened into its UV layout, with the live shader drawn across it.
The 0–1 square is always framed, and islands that escaped it stay visible.
Is the coordinate even across the surface? Measured per unit of real surface — not the UV map underneath it.
Density. Blue where the pattern smears, red where it crowds, with the real multiples on the legend.
Anisotropy. Shape, not area: a coordinate passing density at ×1.03 can still be 30:1 slivers.
A hundred thumbnails shouldn't feel like a hundred distractions. ShaderView keeps the tree readable — and the parts you care about in sight.
Pin any thumbnail to the viewport — it stays on screen (and keeps updating!) while you work at the other end of the tree.
Select a node and unrelated previews fade out — only its chain stays at full opacity.
One click lays the tree out in clean columns — and it's the only auto-layout that accounts for each node's preview footprint, so thumbnails never overlap. Turn on Add Reroutes and long links run along a clean horizontal lane, with everything leaving the same socket sharing one reroute — the bus you'd have built by hand. Reroutes you labelled, and rails you grouped into their own frame, are left exactly as they are.
Version 2.0 keeps the workflow you already know, but adds a whole new toolkit for inspecting and debugging your shaders.
Shader View is tested on Blender 3.0 through 5.x on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
No. Shader View is completely non-destructive. It evaluates your node tree and draws previews on top of nodes, but it never inserts, deletes, or edits any nodes, links, or scene data.
Previews are rendered in a separate background process, and the add-on uses a smart caching system to avoid unnecessary re-rendering. You can lower resolution, reduce update rate, or hide previews entirely when working on heavy scenes — so you stay fully in control of performance.
ShaderView is made by real person by real coding for people who still wanna spend their days making things in Blender by own hands. But this HTML page, however, done with some help from AI.
Meet Light Painter — a brand-new way to light your scenes in Blender. Paint light directly on your viewport in real time, with layers, blend modes, and full non-destructive control. Stop fighting lights — shape exactly what gets lit and how, like you paint in Photoshop.
Check out Light Painter →