This addon displays rendered thumbnails above Cycles shader nodes.

Required OS: Windows 10, Ubuntu 18.04/19.10/20.04, or macOS (Catalina or newer)
Required Blender version: 2.80, 2.81, 2.82, 2.83, 2.90, 2.91, 2.92 or 2.93

Features

• For each node, a preview thumbnail is rendered
• On edits, all affected nodes are automatically updated
• Previews are rendered in a background thread, so the Blender interface stays fluid and responsive at all times
• No changes are made to the .blend, others without the addon can still open your scenes without problems
• High-resolution displays supported (works with Blender’s resolution scale feature)

Caveats

• Only Cycles nodes are supported. Previews are not generated for special Eevee nodes like “Shader to RGB”, or for nodes from other render engines. However, Eevee is compatible with almost all Cycles nodes, so the addon can still be useful even if you render with Eevee
• To show previews for packed images, the .blend file has to be saved to disk first, because they are loaded through linking from the .blend file
• Thumbnails of image sequences are not updated when changing frames
• Open Shading Language script nodes are currently not supported
• IES nodes are currently not supported
• On macOS, the M1 processor is not supported yet, so you’ll have to run Blender in Intel mode to use the addon there