How to assign / view textures on faces in 2.8 like in 2.79 (not via materials)?

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hey,
So, in 2.79 I could assign a checker texture to faces via the UV editor… I could then see this in the viewport in Blender Render / textured mode. This was super useful as you could see the checker texture on the model without having to swap materials on the model. This would allow you to have a fully textured scene with many materials viewable in Cycles / Material mode… then you could switch to Blender render / Textured mode and see the UV checkers / texel density for lightmaps etc on the whole scene.

I can’t seem to recreate this workflow in 2.8. Is there something I am missing? If it’s not possible in 2.8 are there any add-ons that will allow something similar? basically some sort of master override for all the materials in the scene that can be toggled on off to display a UV checker.

any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

cheers

2

Indeed, that would be useful to have an UV checker overlay or shading option.

Current Texture option in Shading popover is relative to a texture used in material.
So, texture by default, is often for rendering and not UV Checking.

What you can do id to create a nodegroup made of a texture coordinate node + an UVgrid Image node + an emission or diffuse shader. Add a second material output and plug this nodegroup to it.
Then, copy/paste these set-up to all materials.
Eventually, it becomes just a question of making active desired material output.
I did not try to automate that with python. I don’t know if there is current limitation that does not allow that.