this is why I proposed a button/checkbox, because I think that there must be a reason. It seems odd that it would be overlooked, then again, there is a 3d cursor in sculpt mode too,lol.
I think if you contacted brecht via Irc it might be a better route.
many thanks!
OK, I contacted brecht in IRC and it loks like this might have a future 
[he said it would be reasonable to add this and the reason for not having it was basically not having the UI for it].
So I added this, made a patch and submitted to the tracker. Here is what it looks like atm (it will add settings for specular color/intensity/hardness to cycles material “Settings” panel)
this will be in code-review now, if you want to follow that you can do so here http://developer.blender.org/D62
i’m confused, so is it still going to be “faked” open gl lights, and not something that is directly related too the actual material (you know, the one that behaves slow)
or is this something completely different and/or better?
just want to make sure, because viewport lag is not a sculptors friend. 
many thanks for looking into this.
Matcaps are the best way to go imo, but any quick fix or hack that doesnt impact performance too much is always welcome as well. Hopefully proper use of matcaps is something to strive for though.
simple materials and opengl has proved best for me, when I used zbrush a few years ago, that was also the case.
obviously people have their preferences, so I just want to be sure that people don’t mistake me for being anti-matcap. Infact theres one particular matcap that ships with blender I find useful, and its the kinda grey glossy/reflective one.
I can move opengl lights around, which is why a favour them. Michalis proposes a system, that can use open gl lights to kinda make matcap “snapshots” so that we have the different lighting situations.
but as i’ve said repeatedly, this thread was more about these two things that could be implemented rather simply, and not have something that would require 5 months of coding. Thats for another thread. I’ll work on that proposal separately for future devs that may be interested.
If we can get faster matcap system that would be great for some of us.
right now, Ton just included matcaps in N panel, and then just abandoned them ? it was a rather strange implementation if you ask me.
@ng-material: yes, this (“Solid” drawmode) now behaves pretty much exactly like BI. It uses the “quickprefs” lights with a simple diffuse+specular shading. but/and is not related to the actual cycles material/shader.
“Material” drawmode should give you better representation but is slow for sculpting 
I would like to look into speeding this up [or at least find out why it’s slow] but not sure if this will have success anytime soon.
brecht also mentioned he would like to have more modern gameengine techniques for viewport drawing such as baked lightprobes but lets see…
I hope this is still an improvement for you guys? Cause the lack of spec (compared to BI) in cycles viewport is where this all started, right?
Thats right 
I have a few questions
did you ask brecht about the only render mode stuff and the gradient?
it seems spec hardness can be changes, how about “shadow softness” ? thats not essential, just a query. Or is spec hardness exactly same as BI? more like intensity rather than hardness? if so ignore that query.
I have a feeling you just made cycles viewport, just like BI, which is exactly what I want, I don’t want to further complicate things.
oh, unfortunalty i’m just a silly user 
not a programmer, and I don’t know how to make builds or anything, so i’ll just have to wait around a bit before I can use it.
so many thankyou’s!!!
i also do not know how to make builts, so need wait for the improvement being in an upgrade. but thanks, if we can have like you showed same resulpt in viewport under cycles engine, then we do not switch anymore. this is already a great improvement for us sculptors! thanks…
hmm more thoughts, how can this be used with quickprefs, if its all the way in the materials tab, will this be available in the N panel too?
If I changed colours of open gl spec and diffuse in quick prefs, will it automatically update the colors in the cycles materials UI that you have proposed?. I wonder if this will “break” the quick prefs addon under cycles. Brecht seems to have proposed to change the name to glossy, instead of spec, which will lead to inconsistency not just to quick pref, but also under the preferences > system.
I like to sculpt full screen, I don’t know if this the same for other sculptors, all I have available is the t and n panel and the upper and lower headers. which can be closed for more space. Quick prefs makes it easy to move the open gl lights around.
so my concern is having to change the lights position in quickprefs N panel, but having to change colours in materials. Not so Ideal.
Thoughts? feedback?
I would like to have this in the regular object mode as well, it’s not only useful for sculpting but for modeling as well.
@ng-material: quickprefs changes the properties of LIGHT, this changes the properties of the MATERIAL… (both will multiply for the endresult; you will most likely not bother with the material spec anyways, just set it to white once and forget about it). So no, this wont break or affect quickprefs. If you really want to change both light and material all the time this can easily be hooked up with the N panel in python (or incorporated in quickprefs even)
@NinthJake: this is also for object mode
I am totally busy today but hope I can make brechts changes tomorrow…
edit: nevermind, I think i get it now.
Out of curiosity, why don’t you use matcap? Ton added it for a reason.
It doesn’t care what render engine is selected and is turned on/off with a simple checkbox, you most likely can even hotkey it.
opengl lights can be moved around.
matcaps also have terrible performance thus far.
They’re very slow, and you can only view one object at a time with them (who came up with this horrible idea? 
)
Will this be merged in 2.70 or in 2.71?
no idea, the project was finished by linchtwerk. Brecht said he would merge after he made some small UI changes over a month ago, and then, well, he didn’t.
lol.
https://developer.blender.org/D62
The fact that he said “I’ll commit this soon, I’ll probably tweak the UI layout a bit to be more compact.” on december 11th leads me to think he got distracted by something and forgot.
eventually he’ll notice/remember. No worries.
FYI, this has finally been commited by psy-fi… 
https://developer.blender.org/rB9124ecb16b220d3222214859ec4b1d67e6313bcc
well, that patch went for quite a journey. But it’s good to see it committed, and it works excellent. Thanks for the great work.
This was fixed also : )
