[solved] What exactly is a "matcap" and how does it aid sculpting?

[thinsoldier]

Matcaps in Blender Cycles

Matcap render setup in cycles

just a few notes… -The tutorial in your link is not the best tutorial you can have. its better to use hdr images for backgroung and global ilumination. You won’t be needing all those nodes in the world shader, and the illumination strength will be more realistic. (those nodes will not work good with other images, and they will just be part of the confusion). Just set the Enviroment texture to ‘non-color’ when using hdr images, to let cycles use the true luminance value at each pixel. -For ma…

I haven’t tried these yet. What I tried was putting an object at the world origin and using a constraint to copy only the rotation from the camera to that object and then use object mapping in the world material to have the matcap image auto rotate to be in line with the camera. Set the texture node with the matcap image to “mirror ball”. The result is sort of similar to the matcap but not exactly.