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  • Published 4 Nov 2024

Bring back 4.1 materials

With the new material tab layout, it has been increasingly difficult to manage transparency, toon outline and other effects that where much easier to achieve back when the different transparency blend options along with the back face culling options where easily accessible in the materials tab. Please bring this back or make an option in addition to the new raytracing features that came with the new material layout as those are useful too, just missing these transparency options from the old Eevee engine.

75%

Development Status: Open

Upvote 6 Downvote 2
jacob56
4 Nov 2024

2 Comments

iCameiSawiBlended

@pablovazquez Could you please describe the process before and after 4.1? That'd make it easier to spot where exactly is the issue.

Not Op, but:

  1. GUI Issues. In 4.1, controlling transparency settings was very easy: Go to the Material Properties panel. Scroll down to the Settings Subpanel. Blend Mode and Shadow Mode are there in drop-downs. Nice! But in 4.2, it's gone. You need to go into the shader editor to adjust Alpha directly, and options like clipping are now buried in the shader node editor. It makes for a more fiddly, less productive system. (Did try and paste a screenshot here)

developer.blender.org/docs/release_notes/4.2/eevee_migration/

  1. Incompatibility Issues. Another issue is 4.1 materials not importing properly into 4.2. For example, my 4,.1 glass shaders no longer work, and I had to write new ones just for 4.2. This is a big issue when you use asset libraries, because it demands you convert everything to 4.2 and don't go back. But 4.2 has performance issues with shader compilation (google "4.2 eevee shader compilation slow") and rendering times

blender.community/c/rightclickselect/B8AN/ .

Because of these we've had to sit out 4.2 (the first release we ever skipped), and the lack of compatibility of 4.1 materials means we can't even do a gradual migration.

I do understand Blender's aversion to backward compatibility, but burning the EEVEE legacy bridges before EEVEE NEXT is finished is too much. Compatibility with 4.1 materials would be a big help.

@pablovazquez And potentially even give it a specific section for NPR effects.

Can't comment on the 4.2 NPR. Will leave that to OP.

1
pablovazquez

Could you please describe the process before and after 4.1? That'd make it easier to spot where exactly is the issue.

And potentially even give it a specific section for NPR effects.