Pause Viewport — Documentation

Requires Blender 5.1 or later.

1. In Blender, open Edit > Preferences > Get Extensions.

2. Click the dropdown arrow at the top right of the window and choose Install from Disk…

3. Select pause-viewport-1.0.0.zip. Blender asks for no permission: the add-on reads nothing, writes nothing and never touches the network.

4. The extension installs and enables itself. Go back to the 3D viewport: the pause button is in the header, immediately to the right of the four viewport shading buttons.

To update later, install the newer zip the same way; it replaces the previous version. To remove it, find Pause Viewport in the Add-ons list and uninstall it — if a viewport is paused at that moment, it is resumed first.

Pause Viewport adds one control and nothing else. It sits in the 3D viewport header, at the end of the row, right after the shading buttons.

The same action is in the search menu as Toggle Viewport Pause, so you can bind it to a shortcut of your own if you use it often.

Pause Viewport is made for the passes where a live preview buys you nothing: building a node tree, wiring a group, filling in a long list of inputs, rebuilding a heavy material.

Pause, do the whole pass, resume once. A dozen changes then cost one evaluation instead of twelve.

A VIEWPORT PAUSED label is drawn over the frozen view, so a still image is never mistaken for a frozen Blender. Its position is set in Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > Pause Viewport.

The change applies immediately, on a paused viewport too. Wherever you put it, the label keeps clear of open headers and sidebars.