Hi guys
At Bcon16 there was a lot of progress on a great and more functional viewport:
I’m a bit confused with all the names of the different viewports (and modes?) but I guess I’m asking about news about the Clay and Workbench engines?
Kind regards!
There is some improvements yes, in the eevee viewport.
I did some tests and it’s much better than the actual viewport on both object and edit mode.
Still not as good as maya with a lot of objects in the scene but much better than before.
The viewport is antialiased, the edit mode is fast for turning, panning and zooming but we have to wait the new dependency graph to have better performances to edit objects.
Concerning the viewport, honnesly I thin I will never use the clay viewport, we cannot remove those bad matcaps, eevee is much plaisant to work with.
There is still a lot of work to do on the viewport, it’s already much better, but that must be even better to use it on big productions.
I thought I was the only one. Please dev stop putting the matcaps front and center of the viewport the suck and are not nice to work with(the never really have been nice to work with).
This is bringing back memories of having to ask for specular shading in the viewport when working with Cycles It took so much bloody effort (from the sculptors and modelers) to convince people that trying to model and read surfaces without specular shading was tough the dance you had to do working in BI(for the viewport) then switching and rendering in Cycles.
Do you think if we make a pack with great matcaps they would add them instead of the bad ones ?
We should add the possibility to choose whatever matcaps we want, it’s weird that this is so “hard-coded”.
I think it would be good if matcaps in clay mode were read from a folder location so you could easily have custom ones.
Matcaps were made hardcoded for performance reasons by Ton.
Images are contributions from members of community.
I already asked for UI consistency if they could have a neutral color.
Since clay engine lets the ability to change HSV, there is no reason to keep them as is.
Devs were not against the idea to use other matcaps for 2.8.
In sources, they are 24 .jpg files of 512x512 px.
So, a pack with same characteristics ( multiple of 8 for number of images, same resolution, same image format ) would have a chance to replace it.
Clay Engine was made by same devs who are working on EEVEE.
Its progress stopped when EEVEE work began. But it does not mean that it will stay as is.
If it’s better then of course they will add them.
This.
Just read the folder from local prefz and let users mantain it.
I never understood why hard code anything. It’s like pre 2.5 hard coded hotkeys.
Any news about the workbench mode ?
Not necessary a build or a screenshot but just an idea on how it should look like (for instance the textured mode of Blender 2.79).
Hardcoding means much less work to write and maintain something, it also requires less knowledge and removes many points of failure.
Amen to that - while it would be nice to swap out matcaps too
Since Blender2.8 where you can rotate, modify hue, of the matcaps… It will be less necessary create new matcaps. But maybe new matcaps with differents surfaces will help.
You can add your own matcaps, Ive done this in old builds but you have to change code in Blender and compile yourself, but it’s not hard to do.
It was planned to be able to load custom matcaps, but obviously it hasn’t ever been implemented. It’s mentioned under implementation notes in the 2.66 release notes. I recall Ton talking about it in the mailing list too, but I can’t be bothered to grep for it.
Matcaps are better if you enable screen space ao… . But if really like to be able to have my own custom ones not hardcod
ed! You “can” do this using blender internal and open gl… . But not as nice a workflow!
Sometimes it’s useful if details are a bit lost like that whilst sculpting, like if you intend to render a sculpt with very soft lighting and you want to make sure you’re accentuating shapes enough to be visible in the soft lit render. I use the white and the light blue matcaps for this purpose sometimes. The matcap I find least useful though is the green radioactive one.
