Lite Material Preview
To be honest, I think when it comes to material preview, it would be much better if we can keep some render settings enabled without turning the Material Preview renderer into a partial version of the Final Render.
Like it can just render the scene and materials without bloating the viewport with graphics that are only meant to be seen on Final Render preview.
Like in this image here, the render options I cut can stay how they are left without affecting the Material Preview renderer. This should stop requiring us to constantly toggle those options when we wanna see how the Final Render preview looks like, thus stopping blender from constantly reloading over and over just because some of us have weaker hardware and cannot work on the material or model in realtime.
It can be similar like how cycles works. You can play around with all settings and only the ones that are available in both eevee and cycles should affect the viewport.
But idk, maybe I'm just a blind crybaby and the solution is already there and I just can't see it.
7 Comments
I never work in material view, only render. Why don't you? If it's just due to dated, limited hardware - upgrade it.
It sounds like you want a way to preview materials without toggling render settings constantly, but I’m not sure what that would look like in practice. Are you asking for better control over which settings affect Material Preview rather than a full toggle? Which ones exactly, and how? It sounds pretty fuzzy to me:
You mention performance concerns, but at the same time you suggest keeping more render settings enabled in Material Preview.
Wouldn’t that make it heavier, not lighter? It feels a bit contradictory.
Also, I don’t see how " like how Cycles works " applies here. In both Eevee and Cycles, when you tweak settings in Rendered shading mode, the changes are visible immediately. (The only exceptions I know, are niche things like micro-displacement.)
I don't think (?) there is a fundamental difference in how rendered shading modes work between Cycles and Eevee (aside from the engines themselves of course).
Could you clarify what you mean?
I explained it above
The render settings I cut there should not do anything in material preview
Pretty much how the render settings in Cycles renderer do nothing to material preview since they are both different renderers
If you enable raytracing, material preview will not show any result until you switch to EEVEE Final Render preview.
Ok so if I understand correctly, when you say:
You actually mean:
"These settings I highlight shouldn't impact the material preview"
You want Eevee's render settings to be more dissociated from the Material Preview?
Is that correct?
For example, you would like if if we had these in the Material Preview's shading options?
something like that yes
it would help with the animation part where some characters require the shader editor to pose some parts about them (2D eyes for example)
if this shader functionality would've worked in solid renderer, then it would've been fine.
or better yet, there could be a renderer dedicated for animation so that you could pose your characters with 2D features without unecessary render features that could potentially slow down the workflow on weaker computers
You can set the solid view to show textures, see its color setting. However it works only with image textures (not procedural), and i don't know if it's able to update properly when animated in some way.
But for the proposal itself, I think it does make sense having the flexibility to use or not use Raytracing/MoBlur/DoF in material view, it definitely is a significant resource impact and I wouldn't expect those to be used in material preview to begin with.
Feel free to edit your original post with updated information and my mockup to make it clearer. It will have greater chances to grab attention from other community members, and in turn from Blender devs.
I do modeling in Eevee with raytracing on, so I do not want it to go from material preview mode.