Jeff Lait

The equivalent of $F4 is <F4>
D:/path/file.<F4>.png

You are correct, that sort of "live" material isn't possible with Material X.

We have some default "visualizers" to help view data types that otherwise would not be visible. Having negative directions all go black isn't very helpful for telling how things will swirl.

Unfortunately, we don't have a Bake Visualizer node, so it is hard to get a rendered output of what you see for things like SDFs and Vector2s.

The code is pretty simple - it projects onto a hexagone in RGB space and then scales by the length of the vector.

In the attached I've copied the code from our visualizers verbatim so should get the same result.