[Bf-committers] Arbitrary materials for mesh display in viewport (solid view)

[Roger Wickes]

1a. Textured Solid View
2a. Light direction and color setting in User Pref

It seem to me we have Blender-level settings (User Prefs), 
then for each 3D View window a selectable view mode that builds on the blender-level,
and then for each object in a 3D View window an override which modulates the above.

This feels like a good hierarchy to me. My only ...blip... in this hierarchy is changing
all the 3D views to be "consistent", but I understand the need to have like 3 of the windows
in wireframe and only one sucking up CPU in solid mode (ah, the wonderful Pentium 3 days).

What if we could agree that the User Prefs and 3D View toolbar/properties pull-out
set up general rules for what and how things are displayed in general, and is set by the user
based on their machine's power. A new feature in User Prefs would be a Lock all 3D Views to changes
made in one 3D View with regard to display quality setting, which would set all the other 3D Views 
(with another option - across desktops) to use the new display quality setting (view mode). 

Then, with some future feature on a group basis, we can set the display level for a group that
either uses the general setting, or over-rides the general setting for objects in that group as has been requested.
For example, all "background" (or "matte") group objects would be in wireframe, "set dressing" in solid,
and "foreground" in shaded view mode. this would allow the user to direct cpu resources to view/display those
objects of most importance in the better quality.

On an object-by-object basis, the Material properties Display panel could "Use default" or could override that 
and define how a specific object is displayed in 3D View. This would be a simple change to the
Material Display panel to have a selector, much like the 3D View selector, with options to 

Use 3D View default
Bounding Box
Solid
Solid Textured
Shaded with GLSL
Shaded Multitexture
Shaded Textured
Textured

which i think mushes all the different modes into one list, roughly ascending by CPU drain. Right now
it is sort of a radio button mush.
Would be nice if the 3D view header display mode option, and the 3D View Properties panel used
this same list for consistency.

This would allow future possibility for us then to have some objects in wireframe and others
textured in 3D view, which is what has beenrequested. 



 --Roger


*Not the coder in this area so take all my suggestions with a grain of salt"


----- Original Message ----
From: Gustav Göransson <gustav.goransson at gmail.com>
To: bf-blender developers <bf-committers at blender.org>
Sent: Wed, June 2, 2010 8:10:04 AM
Subject: Re: [Bf-committers] Arbitrary materials for mesh display in viewport (solid view)

The displaying of models/textures in the viewport might be the most
confusing area in Blender (After five years of using blender I'm still
not sure if I get it...).

Right now we have:

1. Viewport Shading (Textured, Solid, Wire, Bounding Box).
2. Shading setting in the n-panel (GLSL, Multitexture, Textureface) +
Texture solid.
3. Display settings for each object (Texture, solid ,xray etc.).

To this add how blender shows texture loaded in Image/UV editor that
PapaSmurf mentions... and not to mention procedural textures...

In my opinion blender need to be a lot clearer on what are displayed
in the viewport and which setting that overrides others before
introducing more viewport features....