CW Shader Buddy is a Blender addon that provides tools for managing images and materials in your scenes. It adds a sidebar panel to the Shader Editor, Image Editor, and UV Editor.

Quickly overview, assign bitmaps to shaders, and select objects based on their assigned textures or materials.

Additionally, it provides bitmap path information, list collections where objects are located using your bitmaps, material and image name editing tools, and alerts for missing data.

Features

Image Browser

• Thumbnail preview with adjustable sizes (32px - 256px)
• Filter images by usage: All, Packed, Linked or Missing
• Show image usage across Materials, Scene, World and LineStyle shaders
• Quick navigation to shader nodes
• Display image in Image Editor with one click
• Path information and missing file warnings
• Edit images in external editor
• Rename images
• Change bitmap files easily for active shaders only or in whole scene

Material Browser

• List all materials with object assignments
• Quick object selection by material
• Expand/collapse material details
• Filter and search materials
• Rename materials quickly
• Replace materials

General

• Works in Shader Editor, Image Editor and UV Editor
• Automatic thumbnail generation and updates
• Support for packed and linked images
• Save edited images directly from the browser
• List collections to locate hidden or not selectable objects

Installation

1. Download the addon as a ZIP file
2. In Blender, go to "Edit > Preferences > Add-ons"
3. Click "Install" and select the ZIP file
4. Enable the addon by checking the checkbox

You can also simply drag and drop the ZIP file into Blenders viewport. It will be installed automatically.

Usage

The addon panel is located in the sidebar (press N to toggle) under the CW Shader Buddy tab in:

• Shader Editor
• Image Editor
• UV Editor