That would be great. Don’t know if it complicates matters but honestly if Cycles is used to render the previews when Eevee is the active renderer, that would be fine as Cycles doesn’t really slow Blender down noticably when previews get rendered.
Those useless previews are the worst. Eevee AND Cycles! We have thousands of options for everything in Blender, options for things no one needs to have an option for, and then we have those useless previews that stall the computer and waste hours of our lifes and no option to disable them. Please consider that people use Blender for production work with 8k, 16k, and in same rare cases even bigger resolution textures. Just try it out yourself please. Prepare yourself a nice 32k texture, drag it into Blender and see for yourself how much fun it is to work with that.
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I don’t know I haven’t noticed a considerable slowdown with Cycles even with big textures. However in the image editor there is a slowdown for generating previews of high-res images.
@brecht good to hear that the Eevee previews will be able to be turned off (or will be turned off until fixed). I find that even when changing materials, since the preview has to update aswell there is a slight 5-10 s hitch sometimes when that happens.
I’m actually still having this issue. I have a project that involves importing several pretty heavy SVG files, which Blender is quick to do. However, since it generates a material for every single curve (about 26,000 total objects in this case), Blender is locking up when I open up the materials list regardless of what engine I’m using. Being able to disable those previews (at least until the importer can combine similar colors into one material) would be hugely helpful.
I wrote a quick script to combine similar materials to get that number down to about 1k, but the idea of the thumbnails being a potential bottleneck still stands I think. It’s essentially a crash if it freezes Blender indefinitely.
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Same here. Working on heavy materials in shader editor grinds Blender to a halt for 20 seconds upon some changes every now and then. It’d be nice to be able to disable previews. Current workaround is to switch the render engine.
Hi there,
any news on this? Working on a feature-film-production right now and needed to create a custom material-assign-tool because of those previews. Cycles and Eevee are both eating up the entire 30GB of RAM when clicking on the material dropdown. Would be great to get an option to disable previews completely as we are using a lot of linked assets/shaders/textures it will regenerate almost every time.