AnyNode Preview — Geometry Nodes & Shader Preview for Blender

Geometry Nodes and Shader preview cards

One switch draws a cached card over every supported node in a Shader or Geometry tree — textures, shaders, geometry, fields, images. Nothing is rewired to a Viewer and your graph is never touched, because previews are evaluated on a temporary copy. Ctrl+Shift+P toggles it; Show Timing adds the millisecond badge on each card.

Selected node preview and chain focus

A click previews the node, rings its card so the click has a visible answer even when every node already carries one, and highlights the chains passing through it. Only the nodes outside those chains are veiled — Blender's own wires are never redrawn. Focus Opacity sets the veil from 0 to 100%, and Show Input Nodes follows a configurable number of upstream levels.

Geometry Nodes preview, step by step

Curves, meshes, instances and fields render as clay cards on the nodes that make them, including inside Repeat, Simulation and For Each Element zones. Curves are converted for display, so a curve node shows its splines instead of an empty card. When a node genuinely cannot carry one — a passthrough, a frame, an output node — the sidebar names it and says why.

Preview Output appears when a node has more than one visual output and picks the exact socket the card shows. The choice is session-only and the source graph is never rewired.

Geometry Nodes preview in the 3D viewport

Draw the active Geometry node's evaluated result onto the object whose modifier owns the tree — at real scale, in place, and correctly occluded by the rest of the scene. Solid, wire or points; opaque or as a ghost over the real object. It has its own triangle budget, separate from the card budget, because a full-screen overlay is worth more triangles than a thumbnail.

Field and attribute heatmaps on the real mesh

A 64 px thumbnail cannot show where on a dense mesh a value falls. Field and attribute outputs draw as a heatmap on the geometry itself, with a caption naming the node and the range the heatmap is normalised against. Click the overlay to read the value at that point; the reading stays pinned as you orbit.

Before / After wipes the node's input geometry against its output in the same place at the same scale, so the change a node makes is one picture rather than two remembered ones.

Material preview controls in the 3D viewport

A compact HUD follows the active object with Colour, Hue, Sat, Brightness, Roughness, Metallic and Normal. The controls are discovered from the material that is actually connected, and a linked texture is tinted rather than replaced — the texture detail survives. Alt+M shows or hides it in Object Mode; every row has its own reset, and FX On / FX Off compares against the original in one click.

Non-destructive material and shader controls

On first show, Base Color gains neutral Colour Adjust controls while linked Roughness and Metallic maps gain reversible Map Range layers, and Normal, Bump and Displacement expose Strength, Strength and Scale. Every one of them can be removed again, restoring the exact original socket or value. Shared materials show their user count and are never copied without an explicit Make Single User.

World shader and HDRI preview

World trees render through a 3D viewport, wired via a Background, so the card shows the sky you built. Blender's own ID-preview system renders a World to solid black; this path does not. Sky Texture, HDRI and the adjustment nodes between them all show their result.

Card size, timing and link style

Selected card size grows or shrinks the cards of the selected nodes between 25% and 300%. It changes how large the card is drawn, never what is rendered, so it costs no render and cannot invalidate a cached thumbnail.

One Colour with twelve presets drives node links and the active-node outline, and links switch between Curved and Straight. It is opt-in: with it off the add-on never writes to your theme, and turning it off restores the colours you had.

V1.1 CURRENT · October 2026 · build 1.1.0

• +  Supports Blender 4.2 LTS through 5.3 (previously 4.5 and newer).
• +  Preview All on large Geometry Nodes trees is much faster: 151 cards on a 167-node tree in 9.5 s instead of 16.5 s.
• +  The node you click is rendered before the rest of a Preview All pass.
• +  Large meshes reach their card and the 3D viewport overlay faster.
• •  Timing badges on background-worker cards are now precise on Windows.
• •  Thumbnails cached by earlier versions are cleared once on the first run after updating.

V1.0 maintenance updates · August – October 2026

• •  Geometry Nodes editing no longer freezes while uncached geometry is generated: background workers evaluate Geometry cards too.
• •  Fixed previews stuck on Loading after opening another .blend during a preview.
• •  Fixed striped, scrambled or solid-colour Geometry cards after Refresh, cache reloads or background evaluation; affected thumbnails are cleared automatically.
• •  Background Geometry previews transfer half as much data back to Blender.
• •  Added the free Lite trial build.

V1.0 · Launch · August 2026

• •  Preview cards for Geometry, Shader and World trees, with zone support and per-output selection.
• •  3D viewport overlay with field heatmaps, value readout and Before/After wipe.
• •  Material HUD, Material Lens, Channel Board, Visual Explorer, presets and A/B.
• •  World trees preview as environments through Selected Preview, Preview All and Refresh.