As a Blender artist, I am always eager to develop and deepen my understanding of the software. I am increasingly interested in peering under Blender’s hood and understanding its design philosophies.
This feature proposal focuses on Blender’s texturing tools. As an advanced Blender user who often authors their own procedural materials, I have noticed that Blender does not have robust support when it comes to viewing nodes within your Shader Tree, which other texturing softwares such as Mari do offer.
My idea is to create a feature that allows users to group selected nodes into Viewer Groups, which is organised within a dedicated UI. From there the user can view individual nodes, or the group as a whole. They can also snap the view of the Shader Editor to the nodes in the group, a big QOL improvement when dealing with complex, large shader trees.
The full board with all the research and development can be found here:
Blender – Viewer Groups Feature Proposal
luca muscia design 