High performance: Thumbnails are generated by a C++ worker thread in the background, the Blender UI stays fully responsive at all times
Low memory usage: Each thumbnail takes up 265 KiB of graphics RAM (regardless of the size of the previewed texture). 100 thumbnails would use 25.6 MiB - a negligible amount.
Supported Cycles nodes: Image Texture and Environment Texture
No changes are made to the .blend, others without the addon can still open your scenes without problems
High-resolution displays supported (works with Blender’s resolution scale feature)
Caveats
Thumbnails are not displayed for packed images
EXR format currently not supported
Thumbnails of image sequences are not updated when changing frames
About Me
I am the author of the Blender addon for LuxCore. In 2014, I started working on Blender addons by contributing to the LuxRender addon. ImageNodePreview is my first commercial addon.
Previews for all nodes:
I have also created an addon that can show rendered thumbnails for all shader nodes, not just image nodes. If you already own Image Node Preview, you can get it for $10 off with the code:
np-existing-customer
I’d love to see this update for procedural textures too!
Ofcourse you’d have to figure out the best way to preview them, given that they’re 3(or 4)-dimensional, but it’s to be expected that you’d preview them on a particular object, like a flat plane of a certain scale (1 Blender unit?)
B.Y.O.B
(Node Preview and LuxCore Addon Developer)
6
I agree that it would be awesome to have something like this, but it is a whole different topic than creating a thumbnail for an image texture. I’ll think about it, and depending on the success of this first addon I might go for it, but don’t hold your breath (it requires a lot more work than this addon).
No, only the image texture node itself is considered for the preview, it only shows the input texture as loaded from disk.
Too bad, it seems that thumbnails are only created when new textures are added.
Finished nodes do not display texture thumbnails.
Or is it possible to trigger this?
B.Y.O.B
(Node Preview and LuxCore Addon Developer)
9
By “finished nodes” do you mean existing scenes?
The addon works with existing node setups, they should be no different than newly created ones.
To better understand what might be the problem, could you post a testscene that shows the issue? You can also send it to me directly via Blendermarket/gumroad.
Oh sorry my mistake, my textures had the tif format, but is not supported.
Otherwise this addon is a feature I have always wanted. Thank you very much.
B.Y.O.B
(Node Preview and LuxCore Addon Developer)
11
I have just tested and confirmed that the addon works with Blender 2.81 as well.
