The stupid button "use nodes"
Open blender, you are in solid mode and EEVEE by default.
The material's properties shows a button "use nodes" which is on and .. has no function here.
Jump in material mode or render, it's ok (the button give me two choices with has effects on viewport.
Jump in wireframe mode, the button still there.. (and the material properties is still there too, why ???)
Now, jump to Cycles, the button disappears even in solid mode. hum !
(and this more or less the same for world panel)
Probably some will say that "this is not a bug" or this is not important. I am a teacher and my studients always complains about this (and others crazy UI things).
In Blender the "no nodes material" is the base material for solid mode, we use 80% of time. It's important to have a as simple as possible UI and a good color's contrast in the scene.
To go more further, (if a dev read) i suggest two others mods :
- switch the text from "use nodes" to "don't use nodes" (or something) like a play/pause button.
- add a feature "sync with nodes" that scanning the average values of Base color/Metallic/Specular/Roughness of the output material with nodes. it's will help to maintain a beautiful solid mode view.
thanks for reading !
7 Comments
you should reformat your post to say how you want the button to change it's a big button, and I find it odd, yes! but note eevee is all about speed. it has a basic, built-in material that is faster if you ignore subsurface, anisotropic, sheen, clearcoat, etc, math.
The reason it's on by default is feature parity with cycles. By default EEVEE respects things that would work in cycles, and I highly suggest you have them use cycles to render. Not only is it easier to understand for students (cycles simply simulates what light does, or at least the end result of what light does), but without needing any setup, light probes, or so on, it's faster to learn in, too, even if a proper render can take a minute or two, and makes use off more of blender's material and lighting features.
EEVEE Next is in production in the latest alpha, and with make them even more similar with global illumination and raytracing compatibility, and not needing light probes.
It absolutely has a use there. If you turn it off - there you are, basic shading with no nodes.
Tell your students that the default is "nodes on" because the majority of professional blender users want a node-based material, thus it is default for convenience.
So the purpose of this button in this context is to force the user to set it to off ! Come on, in solid mod, the node base material doesn't display.
This is simply false. As I mentioned in my first comment, the Solid view is controlled by the Viewport Display panel:
Eevee's non-nodal material is only partially synced to it (Viewport Display's doesn't have a Specular setting), but you don't have to use it to control the solid view's look.
Materials depend on the render engine, not the viewport's shading mode, it makes sense to keep the material settings regardless of your viewport shading mode. They also change if you switch to Workbench engine, or another third-party engine.
I would argue to always keep some of Eevee's materials settings that impact the Material Preview shading mode.
Not exactly. The "no nodes material" exists only in Eevee and is synchronized with the Viewport Display panel, which is what drives each material's appearance in Solid shading mode, but only if set to use the material color type.
IMHO the issue here is having that non-node material in the first place. I don't know if it achieves anything the nodes can't do. And if so: we should add nodes to fill the gaps. Otherwise, It's exactly the same as the Viewport Display but with an extra Specular slider.
I don't think many people would be bothered to have only nodes in Eevee.
Same for lights. It's so weird to have this half-nodal system where the nodes are basically factored by the non-nodal material settings of the light, it's not the most intuitive system and definitely feels redundant. We could have all the lights settings as nodes, giving us even more flexibility as well.
A play button would be definitely confusing, changing the button to its negative effect sounds like unnecessary work for no gain.
There has been proposals like that, where instead of having basically a "second material" for each material, just have the shader tree automatically approximated to "something" in the viewport.
But I reckon that would require to compute the shaders. Not the most performant task to do in solid view.
I agree but it's not the issue. The button is a part of the UI. At least, a UI must follow two principes :
play/pause is for media stream. I wanted to say something that would more clearly indicate the status. It's only a suggestion, of course, but it might make the logic of this button clearer.
The panel preview does it very often. i guess it could be possible to average four channels quicky.
It's not a matter of it being possible, it's a matter of it being worth for the context.
There are procedural shader warriors doing this kind of stuff 🥹