Material Highlighter

Have a single mesh with dozens of materials that were just numbers or in a language you might not speak? And you looked to enhance that 1 single material? Then this little addon is the solution! Quickly selected one material after another it highlights the mesh region in the viewport of the current active material it has been assigned to. That way you can quickly use the arrow keys or your mouse to shuffle through all of them.

Note: It will NOT move with the model itself, so it is faster. So when you moved the model while having it active, either select another material or disable, or re-enable it, then the position should update. Usually it's more designed to turn it on, finding the material assigned to a certain area of a single object that has plenty of materials and disable it.

Insert 0 as price and as a tip insert 0, as I created this with the help of ChatGPT and Serpens for Blender.

Can't believe no one ever had this idea so far or why isn't this in Blender by default. Took me some time to get it as fast and fluid like I wanted it, but it was me arguing with ChatGPT so no big deal.

-Known Issues:

Low res meshes like just a cube do not look good. It should have some geometry, it doesn't need to be that high, but on a non subdivided cube alone it looks terrible. -> You can use Culling Back now so it is easier.

Procedural mesh aka. Geometry nodes will not work even though you assign the material with a node in Geonodes it won't highlight that. If the mesh is actually there, and you use Geonodes to scatter something on it, then it will show the base object. (Actually it works on some, I have to look which circumstances do this)

There might be more that I have not stumbled upon yet.

-Compatibility:

Tested successfully in Blender 3.4 - 4.2x

Blender 3.30 I tried but no highlight shows up.

-Changelog:

• 1.0.3 - Initial release
• 1.0.4 - When you load a new file and Mesh highlight was enabled, it get's disabled properly and won't cause to immediately highlight a material in the new loaded file
• 1.0.5 - Blender 4.3 shows now a checkbox
• 1.0.6 - New Feature added: Culling modes, you can now pick 3 culling modes: None, Back and Front, None used to be default so front and back faces of the mesh region show up, Back hides the back faces based on face orientation/normal orientation, so if the faces are flipped it might become front instead. Front hides the front faces. I added some descriptions as well.
• 1.1.0 - New Feature added: Blend modes, you can select between 3 blend modes: Additive, Additive Premult and Alpha Premult, I made Additive the new default that way you can still see the original mesh/textures underneath but it is softer. Additive_Premult makes a few color differences between front and back faces, dark orange is back face while a bright yellow is a front face. While Alpha_Premult looks like the old (which was actually just Alpha, but I thought Alpha_Premult was a notch better)