Selecting materials for editing without selecting from an object's material slot

The way I generally have a material for editing in the node editor, is by selecting said material in an object’s material slots to which this material is applied. However, switching to editing another material would require identifying another slot on which a material is assigned.

  1. Is there a workflow to select an arbitrary material to have it be available for editing in the node editor?

I am aware you can edit material properties in the Datablocks view of the Outliner, but I want to edit arbitrary material in the node editor.

you could write a script !

or add a plane add material then edit it !

happy bl

Bump. Is there an addon that accomplishes this. This seems like a pretty annoying workflow as opposed to being able to manage a library of materials.

on win you can select mat in outliner then drag and drop it onto an ob in viewport!

happy bl

Yeah, I am running into the same issue frequently. As of now the only workaround I know is to apply said material to a temporary object, as mentionned above. This is especially annoying considering how accurate the Cycles material preview is.

There is a material selector in the header of the node editor which will display all materials in the scene and has a search/restriction field. There is also a button in the header which will pin the node tree so it will stay in that node editor even if you select other objects.

Jan, thanks for the tip but I am not quite understanding what you mean - when I select a material through that field, it assigns it to the last selected object, even if no objects are currently actively selected in the scene. Am I missing something ? Or maybe you are using some kind of dummy object to perform these operations on ?