Node Peek

Changelog

Node Peek 0.5.5 adds individual preview sizing to the Shader Editor.

Select one or more nodes and use Individual Preview Size in the Node Peek sidebar to scale their previews from 25% to 300%. Each node keeps its own size, while multiple selected nodes can be resized together.

Reset Selected restores the selected previews, and Reset All restores every preview to its default size.

Resizing is instant, does not trigger a new render, and never modifies or dirties the .blend file.

Changelog

Version 0.5.2 adds an optional Normalize Data Previews setting.

It makes HDR maps and values outside the 0 to 1 range easier to inspect by normalizing each RGB channel of data previews.

Shader previews remain unchanged, preserving their lighting, reflections, and cached results.

This release also adds compatibility with the latest Blender Compositor API.

Changelog

v0.5.1 — safety fix from an internal review of the custom-node feature.

Fixed

• Tab-editing inside an add-on custom group node could show a wrong thumbnail for its interior nodes: stub-bound custom groups don't sync their instance sockets with interface changes, so the socket-routing fallback could silently pick a different output socket. The routed socket is now verified and the preview is skipped instead — no thumbnail rather than a wrong one. Regular node groups are unaffected.

No other changes. Full regression suite passes (tests/ in the repository).

Changelog

v0.5.0 — custom node support (most requested feature).

Added

• Nodes created by other add-ons (ShaderNodeCustomGroup) now render correctly: their own preview AND every node downstream of them. Previously they loaded as "undefined" in the background render worker (which runs --factory-startup), producing flat previews and breaking the rest of the chain. The worker now registers lightweight stub types before loading the material, so Blender binds the nodes by idname and Cycles renders their internal trees natively, previews match your own render. Works with per-instance node trees and with custom nodes nested inside groups. Nothing from the user's file is ever executed: idnames are plain strings, the stub classes are the add-on's own code.

Changed

• Add-on nodes that genuinely can't render in Cycles (pure-Python nodes, nodes for other render engines) now show no thumbnail instead of a misleading flat one, matching what they do in your own render.

An automated regression suite for this feature ships in the repository (tests/), covering per-instance trees, custom nodes inside groups, downstream rendering, and unrenderable node handling.

Thanks to the user who reported this with a precise diagnosis (@trickerse)

Changelog

v0.4.2 — portability hardening and maintainer documentation.

Fixed

• Windows: the worker log now opens with explicit UTF-8. With the platform default encoding (cp1252), non-ASCII node or material names could raise UnicodeEncodeError from inside an error handler and kill the render worker.
• Custom OCIO configs without an "sRGB" colorspace: thumbnail loading no longer misclassifies files as corrupt (previously caused an endless delete/re-render loop).
• Custom OCIO configs without a "Standard" view transform: preview rendering no longer fails; the config's default view is used instead.

Added

• ARCHITECTURE.md in the repository: the two-process design, safety invariants, failure modes and recovery, and a debugging guide.

No behavioural or UI changes. Also includes the v0.4.1 review fixes: preferences accessed via package, and the "Render" tag removed.