in blender 5 the material thumbnails and the material preview are missing for most materials. Sometimes they are generated, but most of the time not. Although I believe the problem already existed in Blender 4.5. Please see the attached screenshot.
I am using blender 5 on windows 11 with Vulcan enabled. Switching to OpenGL doesn’t seem to fix the problem anyway. This doesn’t seem to be a common problem, at least I couldn’t find any similar topics on the web.
This is a problem for me, because most of the time I identify the materials in the list by their colours rather by their names. I often don’t give them names at all.
Any help would therefore be very welcome. Perhaps there is a way to force blender to generate all material thumbnails, even if this would take some time?
Thanks in advance!
If there are many lists, only a part of them will be displayed as shown in the attached image.
What’s on the list will be updated once you run the rendering preview.
But we can’t do a preview.
This seems to be some users and not others.
The information I saw in this regard was that it was related to GPU drives.
I didn’t look into it in detail because it was a function I didn’t need.
It seems to be a EEVEE-Next issue as it works with blender 3.6.
Thanks for you answer. I also think that it must have to do with either Eevee Next or some other changes in the rendering architecture.
If there are many lists, only a part of them will be displayed as shown in the attached image.
What’s on the list will be updated once you run the rendering preview.
I may have misunderstood you, but the problem is not, that the listbox is too short for too many material entries but that the material thumbnails are not generated or updated at all, even when I create a new material. I can see some kind of spinning “progress wheel” at the position where the thumbnail should go, but then it disapears an no thumbnail is shown.
I also feel like it takes longer to create the (then missing) thumbnail than in older versions of blender. Therefore you may be right, that this is an result of switching to Eevee Next.
