Is There A Simple Way To Export Groupped Nodes For Sharing?

Hi folks. I’ve made a groupped node that does the same thing as the Vector > Mapping node (when “Point” is selected at the top), but it can also take values from other nodes as input and has a few other minor additions, too. I know that if I want to use this node in my own creations I can simply link it from the .blend that contains it, but I don’t really see any point in making it and then just keeping it to myself, so I’d like to know how to make it available for anyone else to use. Is there a way I can export a groupped node so that someone could just download it from the internet and pop it in an extensions folder somewhere so that it appears in the list of nodes in the node editor?

Here’s a screenshot of what I’m talking about.

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You can share a blend and they can use it to append to their scene.

Yeah that was the thing I was hoping to avoid. I have a .blend file that’s mostly just scraps from testing stuff out, half-finished materials, or stuff like this mapping node that’s actually finished. I was hoping there’d be some way of exporting groupped nodes as self-contained packages, so that I don’t end up having to either save a copy of the file where everything but the node I want to share has been deleted and needing to do that for every node I want to share, or have to share a file that’s mostly full of junk .

It would be nice if there was a better way to share materials or compositing nodes.

Check these addons:

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Thanks. They sound a bit closer to what I’m looking for, but would the person who’d download a node that I’d put on the internet also need the addon to be able to make use of the node?

I get the impression that, given that you’ve suggested two addons, there’s just no way of importing/exporting groupped nodes on a vanilla installation of Blender?

Your best option is saving them as node groups in a blend file and share that blend file as suggested earlier. Why you don’t want that?

I just wanted to avoid the hassle of making a blend file for each node that I wanted to share, and also making sure I’d stripped out anything else that shouldn’t be there (although thinking about it, it’d just be a broken reference that’d be left behind rather than a potentially huge HDRI file that’d bloat the file, right?).

I just thought exporting/importing nodes individually would be a cleaner way of going about it, assuming Blender had that functionality, which I’m getting the impression it doesn’t by default.

Thanks for at least showing me the available options, though. I’ll probably just use the blend files option and try to avoid accidentally leaving meshes that I hid and then forgot about.

image

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Well, you can do this:
1- Apply the materials you want to share to a cube (like submaterials)
2- Launch a fresh Blender and copy/paste that cube (So that all your hdrs etc. won’t be an issue)
3- Save the Blender file and you can share this saved .blend file with anyone
4- Then people can append or link (not import/export !) that .blend file to access all your materials and node groups.

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Cool. Thanks guys.

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