I’ve finished many months of work on my new add-on: Node Bar. It’s a fully customizable bar of icons that makes it faster to add all your material nodes inside Shader Editor.
To add nodes you just click and drag nodes out from icons.
Resize Node Bar with Middle Mouse and move it with Right Mouse.
Customize Node Bar in the Shader Editor N-Panel. Group your favorite nodes however you like. You can also put them into rows and label each row.
The customizable Node Bar is called Mini Bar but you can also toggle the Full Bar, which simply contains all the nodes. Full Bar can be organized into one, two or three rows. That’s a lot of icons, but because they are always in the same place, you will learn where things are after using it for a while.
Note that Node Bar is only for Shader Nodes. There is currently no support for Geometry Nodes. Let me know if that’s something you would like to see, and I will consider making a version of this add-on for Geo Nodes as well.
A geometry version is very possible, but it’s more difficult because there are lots of Geo Nodes, and therefore a lot of icons I would have to design, and I imagine it might be tricky to design nice recognizable graphics for each node. But… not impossible!
The other thing, though is that I think blender devs keep adding more geo nodes all the time… But again, not a huge issue.
Yeah, I will definitely look into this, especially if more people will be interested.
Heya! Bought this one today, but having some issues.
While using the full bar, some of the icons seem unresponsive and I cannot drag the appropriate node onto the node area. (I like the full bar because I’m still a noob and figured having all nodes visible would help me see what I didn’t know existed).
This is mostly on the icons that are most to the right, and it only seems to affect 1 or 3 bar mode?
For some reason all icons work when using the 2 bar mode.
1 bar mode really doesn’t fit my screen, so I really have no intention of using it, but still.
The funny thing is that not even the name of the node will pop up when I hover over the icons, and it is different ones depending on the bar I set.
(will post the other screenshot in another reply because It seems I can’t post more than 2)
Thanks again for sharing that information. I see that the 3 rows isn’t being configured correctly for some reason, but I’m not sure why, yet. When you go to Window > Toggle System Console, do you see any errors and if so, could you share a screenshot? Thanks.
@Apraxas I am now aware that the bug you reported happens when creating a new file while running Node Bar. I will try to fix this ASAP. I just wanted to check if you are encountering the bug in any other situation outside of this, or is it also happening for you after you have gone to File > New, while running Node Bar? Thanks!
@z01ks Funnily enough, the bug happens on a file I created about a month before buying the addon.
Opening it directly by double clicking will start with the bar bugged. However, if I start a new file and then load the suspect blend file, the bar will work fine.
I figured out the issue with the Node Bar getting in the wrong order when set up in 3 rows. Bug fix in progress. I’ll keep you posted but I should be able to upload it by the end of the week. Thanks for reporting the issue in detail.
