What are some typical scenarios where you’d want to use the bounding box or solid viewport shading in Cycles?
I can’t think of a useful scenario for the bounding box viewport shading. If I want to look at a scene at its most basic level, the wireframe viewport shading does the job.
I can’t think of a reason why I’d ever choose the solid viewport shading. The material shading seems to do what the solid viewport shading does – but better, since you can get an idea of what the materials (really, the textures) might look like when rendered.
It’s entirely possible I’m missing something and there really are some good uses for these two viewport shading options. If there are, what are they?
In animations, if you need to check timing and your scene playback is lagging for example, bounding boxes still show you the location of objects as placeholders. Solid view is sometimes useful either for verifying the proportions of volumes or geometries without distracting textures.
Sometimes even wireframe is not lightweight enough. Think about e. g. a few dozen (or hundred) high poly trees: You want to get a feeling for their position and/or distribution across the scene, but wireframe might still slow your viewport to a crawl (and we all know that viewport performance is not Blender’s strongest suit).
Hm. I would think that for the modeling phase alone solid shading is invaluable?