Add Unlit + Anisotropic Shading Option for Solid View’s Viewport Display (Vulkan Ready)
I’d like to propose adding an Unlit + Anisotropic shading option directly in the Viewport Display settings of materials for Blender’s Solid View.
Currently, Solid View only supports basic settings like Metallic and Roughness in Viewport Display, which limits how materials appear. Adding an unlit mode with anisotropic reflections here would let artists preview material directionality and surface flow quickly without switching to Material Preview.
With Blender moving towards Vulkan for viewport rendering, this feature could be efficiently integrated, improving performance and offering advanced shading right in Solid View.
Benefits:
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Faster, clearer feedback during modeling and surfacing.
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Better visual representation for hard-surface and technical artists.
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Aligns Blender’s viewport with industry standards like Maya’s Viewport 2.0.
Would be great if this could be included in the Vulkan roadmap or considered as a standalone enhancement.
Thanks for considering!
2 Comments
This really would be a very nice addition to the workbench engine. Where "Texture" can be enabled, it however doesn't show the texture which is plugged into base colour, but rather the selected image texture in the shader graph. This can be very frustrating have to go through all shaders and manually select the albedo texture.
The viewport shading options of the solid viewport allows to change it to "Texture", this shows whatever texture is plugged into the base color of the shader, without any lighting, normals or whatever. It's drawn on the current matcap too.
As for a preview, it covers my basic needs perfectly. Doesn't account for some stuff like color correction, but most of the time makes the viewport work like 3DS Max.