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  • Published 19 Aug 2026

Geo Nodes Viewer: Add a built-in selection input to limit what is viewed

When I have a model with many edges or verts, and I want to see the value of a specific attribute overlaid on the mesh, I often cannot discern which value affects which vert or edge.

If we could have a selection input on the viewer node we could limit what is displayed to just that selection. (Edit: to clarify, I am referring to the text display of attributes, not the coloring of the geometry).

(I am not talking about hiding geometry with the selection node, but rather only displaying attributes for the elements that are part of the selection).

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Development Status: Open

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bvz
19 Aug 2026

3 Comments

maxime1

Interesting, like a Selection socket in the viewer node ? This would work only when geometry is plugged in I suppose.

The idea is interesting but I think it has some flaws when I first think about it :

  • When would the Selection socket appear ? The viewer can preview fields and attributes, but also single values, strings and so on.
  • If the selection input is here, how can we properly differentiate it from a regular boolean socket that you'd try to visualize for example
  • When using the selection with geometry being viewed, should it also cut the geometry in the viewport like a separate geometry ? If not, how would it look in the viewport with a field / attribute being viewed on top of the geometry ? Should we still see the full attribute or just the selection has the attribute view, and the rest is regular viewport shading (I'm not sure if this is even possible without splitting the geometry at some point)
  • Considering the previous complications about viewport, should it only affect the spreadsheet ? If so, would we see the index value of each element be their actual index value in the whole geometry or would it be sorted back down from 0 to whatever.

These are the main complex elements to figure out.

maxime1

also, currently the attribute viewing mode in the viewport is completely flat. I think it would be great to overlay the attribute on top of the regular viewport shading mode, which it already possible somewhat with Vertex Colors and such. It would probably solve your "lack of visibility" issue

bvz Author

You bring up some valid questions. Here is how I would (imperfectly) try to answer them:

  1. I imagine the selection socket would only appear when geometry is plugged in. If the viewer was previewing a single value, the selection socket would have no influence on the output.
  2. I don't have a good answer for this question that doesn't involve some hacky UI solution. Perhaps we could separate the selection socket from the rest of the viewer node with a line to indicate that it behaves differently. But this is a very inelegant solution that would inevitably lead to user confusion. Perhaps a separate "filter" viewer node that can be turned on and off from a control on the viewer node - i.e. hit the filter button and a new node is inserted prior to the viewer node that filters the output - and THAT would have the selection input. But now that I read what I wrote, I still kind of hate that UI about 98%. I could give it some more thought when I have more time, but at the moment I don't have a decent solution to this issue.
  3. I don't imagine it would split the geometry. The full geometry would still be visible, just the attributes would be filtered. To be clear, I was thinking that it would only affect the display of text elements (something I wasn't clear about in my original post. I will update that).
  4. If it did anything to the spreadsheet (something I hadn't thought about, but would be a very good addition), I imagine it would simply highlight the "selected" rows. So no need to re-index.