Tips and Tricks

Feel free to contribute any tricks you know.

Beantextures as Switch Node Generator

Something you might not know: if you do not specify any image for a Beantextures link, for instance:

(notice the empty image)

then Beantextures will simply add an empty color socket. This can be used for switching between images, for instance:

simplescreenrecorder-2025-06-27_19.16.50.mp4

Which is similar to this switcher node add-on, just that Beantextures only supports "hard-switching".

You can make use of this feature to combine multiple Beantextures nodes together, like so:

Leveraging Drivers!

Don't stop at sliders! You can combine Beantextures with traditional driver-based approaches too to create various kinds of rig controls, for instance:

simplescreenrecorder-2025-06-27_19.24.23.mp4

Baking Drivers (for Render Farms)

Render Farms often don't allow drivers as they can potentially be harmful. Therefore, if you use Beantextures (especially the enum linking), you may want to bake your keyframes first. You can use tools or scripts for that, such as this add-on by Crownie.

The problem with the add-on above is that it is not optimized for Beantextures specifically. Every Enum properties maps linearly with the integer it's driving, so copying each frame is overkill—copying the respective f-curve is all that's needed. I may add an extra utility for this in the future.