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  • Published 29 Apr 2020

Copy nodes between blender instances

I need to be able to copy full node trees from one blender file to another blender file. I could append node groups, but then I'd have to manually reconnect the render layer node's output sockets back up manually because they don't get imported. I could also append a full scene, but then I'd have to copy all my objects into the new scene and then re-set up all the render settings etc.

So ctrl + C in another open blender instance would be great, and then during import it would enable any necessary render passes so that the render layers node in the compositor can be replaced with the pasted render layers node.

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Development Status: Open

Upvote 17 Downvote 0
3di
29 Apr 2020

3 Comments

ckohl_art

This proposal sounds a lot like how UE4 can copy/paste full node trees in its node editors (e.g. the Material Editor) which is a very good quality of life feature that has saved many artists many hours of work and heartache.

What gets copied to the clipboard is a structured text representation of the full node tree. This means that you can paste it between editor instances, onto a website, or in Notepad, etc. which facilitates very easy sharing of trees between artists who can copy/paste back into Unreal. For example, this is what a moderately-sized node tree looks like in text form: pastebin.com/1RH3Yk4k This contains everything from node positions to connections and values.

So yeah, adding this type of feature to Blender would be fantastic.

2
xan2622

You might be interested in these addons:

Node Custom Builder (free):

Node Kit ($):

Matalogue (another interesting (free) addon to manage nodes, but afaik, it doesn't support importing/exporting nodes):

1
3di Author

* @ xan2622 * awesome thanks, i'll check those out.