Link material color to viewport color?

Support Materials and Textures
1

If I create a material while in Blender Internal and then switch to Cycles that material’s color and viewport color are linked.
Changing one changes the other.

If I create a material in Cycles the two colors are separate.
Is there a way to specify for these to be linked/unlinked? Is this a setting I missed or a bug or what?

I like having the option, but it seems I have to switch over to BI and start the material there if I want that.

Thanks

2

In Cycles, you can set the viewport color independently under the material’s Settings tab. There you can assigne the color to be anything you need it to be independently from the actual shader color, unlike BI. This means that if you need a visual of what objects in scene are sharing a material, you can easily change the color there and see the feedback in viewport.

3

Thanks for the reply and I understand that. But that wasn’t my question.
Try this:

  1. Set your render engine to Blender Internal and add a new material to an object. Give it a color, let’s say red.
  2. Switch to Cycles. It gets converted to a Cycles material, colored red.
  3. Try switching the viewport color to blue. You will be surprised to find that the material color also changes to blue!

Edit: Or just open this .blend and move the sliders if that’s easier.

4

And if you click ‘use nodes’ then the link is broken because the material is then converted to a Cycles Diffuse shader input to a Cycles Material Output node. The problem is we assume that merely switching to Cycles converts to a Cycles material, when in fact it is still a Blender Internal material until you choose ‘Use Nodes’…

Perhaps a small feature request to add a Lock or Pin icon option to lock the Settings color to the same as the initial shader color…

5

Okay, this makes sense now if it’s not getting converted to a Cycles material until “Use Nodes” has been clicked.

Perhaps a small feature request to add a Lock or Pin icon option to lock the Settings color to the same as the initial shader color…

That would be convenient and I would probably save my default scene with the link option checked.

Thank you for explaining.

6

You can also just set your viewport to Material in Cycles and it will act like BI does in Solid.

7

Hey, thanks - that’s a great tip! I never noticed that extra view option in Cycles.

The only thing not quite ideal is that if I hit Shift+Z for Rendered Viewport Shading, when I hit it again to toggle back it defaults me to Solid again. I wonder if there is a way to get around this.