Preview

The Preview panel gives a quick visualization of the active material and its properties. Including its Shaders, Ramps, Mirror Transp properties and Textures. It provides several shapes that are very useful for designing new shaders: For some shaders (like those based on Ramp colors, or a Diffuse shader like Minnaert), one needs fairly complex or specific previewing shapes to decide if the shader being designed achieves its goal.

Options

Flat XY plane
Useful for previewing textures and materials of flat objects, like walls, paper and such.
Sphere
Useful for previewing textures and materials of sphere-like objects, but also to design metals and other reflective/transparent materials, thanks to the checkered background.
Cube
Useful for previewing textures and materials of cube-like objects, but also to design procedural textures. Features a checkered background.
Monkey
Useful for previewing textures and materials of organic or complex non-primitive shapes. Features a checkered background.
Hair strands
Useful for previewing textures and materials of strand-like objects, like grass, fur, feathers and hair. Features a checkered background.
Large Sphere with Sky
Useful for previewing textures and materials of sphere-like objects, but also to design metals and other reflective materials, thanks to the gradient Sky background.

Examples

../../../../_images/render_blender-render_materials_properties_preview_flat.png

Plane preview.

../../../../_images/render_blender-render_materials_properties_preview_sphere.png

Sphere preview.

../../../../_images/render_blender-render_materials_properties_preview_cube.png

Cube preview.

../../../../_images/render_blender-render_materials_properties_preview_monkey.png

Monkey preview.

../../../../_images/render_blender-render_materials_properties_preview_hair.png

Hair Strands preview.

../../../../_images/render_blender-render_materials_properties_preview_sky.png

Sky Sphere preview.