Node Peek：Blender 材质与纹理插件

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Description (Markdown body)

See what every node does — without plugging it into the output.

Node Peek renders a small thumbnail above each node in the Shader Editor, showing that node's actual output. Textures, ramps, math, mixes, and full BSDFs all get a live preview, so you can read a material at a glance instead of rewiring it to the Material Output over and over.

Features

• A preview on (almost) every node — texture, colour and vector nodes show a flat 2D map; shader nodes show a lit sphere.
• Live updates — tweak a value and the affected previews refresh on their own.
• Never blocks Blender — previews are rendered in a separate background process, so the interface stays responsive even on heavy graphs.
• Doesn't touch your file — nothing is written into your .blend; open your scene anywhere, with or without the add-on.
• Smart caching — only nodes that actually changed re-render; results are reused across undo/redo and reverted tweaks.
• Node-group aware — step into a group and its interior gets previews too, evaluated with that instance's real inputs.
• Light on resources — thumbnails render at 1 sample where possible, on a capped number of threads, at low process priority.

How it works

When your material changes, Node Peek hands a copy of just that material to a persistent background Blender running in –background mode. It renders each changed node's output to a small image, which the add-on then draws above the node with the GPU. Your actual scene is never modified and never re-rendered.

Usage

• Open a Shader Editor and select an object with a node-based material.
• Previews appear above the nodes automatically.
• Open the N-panel → Node Peek for controls (resolution, refresh, clear).

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