In this very short video, I’ll show you the shortcut for connecting any Compositing node in Blender directly to a Viewer node, so you can view the node’s output in the Compositing window's backdrop.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone! In this very short video, I’ll show you the shortcut for connecting any Compositing node in Blender directly to a Viewer node, so you can view the node’s output in the Compositing window's backdrop.
The shortcut is CTRL SHIFT and click on the node you’re interested in. Obviously, at least in Blender 4.3, it only works if you’ve already rendered the scene at least once and if you’ve enabled the Backdrop option in the Compositor editor.
The preview in the Backdrop, as you may already know, can be resized with the V key to shrink it, and with CTRL V to enlarge it. You can move the Backdrop around inside the editor using ALT and the middle mouse button.
In my tutorials, I usually don’t use CTRL SHIFT and click, because I prefer to show the connection being made by dragging, to make the tutorial clearer. Also, I often use a Reroute node to split the final result of the node setup and send it to both Composite and Viewer. Using the CTRL SHIFT and click shortcut will disconnect the Viewer from the Reroute, so that’s one of the reasons I don’t use it.
By the way, in a simple setup like the one I’m showing you now, you can just select the group of nodes and press the M key, which is the shortcut for Mute, to disable or enable the group.
However, the CTRL SHIFT and click shortcut is really useful when working inside a group, because in this case Blender will automatically create a new Viewer node and show its preview in the Backdrop, without removing the Viewer node that’s outside the group. When you exit the group, you’ll be able to see the Viewer node in the main node tree. And when you enter the group again, you’ll find the internal Viewer node and see its preview in the Backdrop. Just a reminder that you can enter and exit selected groups by pressing the TAB key.
Unlike most of my video tutorials, the PDF version of this tutorial is not currently available for download. However, you can find the link in the description to the page that contains PDF versions of many of my other video tutorials. In any case, this is a great moment to subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications! Alright, that’s it for this super short tutorial! I hope you found it helpful! See you soon!