Textures and Preview

Material Graph supports drag-and-drop texture workflows, automatic texture node creation, and inline texture previews so you can build and verify shading networks without leaving the graph canvas.

Drag-and-Drop Textures

Drag an image file from the Omniverse file browser (Content panel) directly onto the graph canvas. Material Graph creates the appropriate texture node, sets its file path, and places it at the drop location.

Supported Formats

The set of accepted file extensions is configurable in Preferences > Material Graph > General > Droppable Texture Formats. The default list is:

Format	Extension(s)
PNG	.png
JPEG	.jpg, .jpeg
Targa	.tga
Bitmap	.bmp
HDR (Radiance)	.hdr
OpenEXR	.exr
DirectDraw Surface	.dds
GIF	.gif
Photoshop	.psd
TIFF	.tif

If a file’s extension is not in the list, the drop is silently ignored. Add the extension to the preference to enable it.

Automatic Node Creation

When you drop a texture, Material Graph inspects its channel count and asks the active render-context plugin for compatible texture nodes. If there is one choice, the node is created immediately. If there are several choices, a menu lets you select one. The selected node’s file-path input is populated with the dropped asset’s path.

Texture Preview

Shader nodes with an assigned asset-valued texture input can display a thumbnail preview below the node body. This gives you at-a-glance confirmation that the correct texture is assigned without opening a separate asset viewer.

Preview Settings

Use the following setting in Preferences > Material Graph > Graph to control previews:

Setting	Effect
Preview Texture Input	Enables or disables the inline texture preview on all nodes.

Disable the preview if you prefer a more compact graph layout or are working with very large networks.

Catalog Textures Tab

The Textures tab in the Catalog panel provides a browsable gallery of texture assets. Each texture appears as a thumbnail that you can drag directly onto the canvas, following the same creation logic as a file-browser drop.

Configuration

Setting	Location	Effect
Textures Path	Preferences > Material Graph > Catalog	Points to the directory used to load and store texture metadata and icons. Update it to expose a project-specific texture library.
Catalog Texture Icon Size	Preferences > Material Graph > Catalog	Controls the thumbnail display size in the Textures tab. Larger values make textures easier to identify; smaller values show more entries.
Show Catalog | Preferences > Material Graph > Catalog | Toggles the entire Catalog panel, including the Textures tab.