[Bf-funboard] Viewport Transparency and Cycles

[Julian Herzog]

Hi,

I would like to point out that it is slightly unintuitive that the Object
panel > Display > Transparency checkbox works with transparency in Blender
Internal materials but not with anything in Cycles materials. So to make it
work in a Cycles environment, you have to switch to BI, disable Nodes in
the specific material, edit the Transparency value, switch nodes back on
and change back to Cycles. I do this quite often but it's a little
complicated. Also (and more importantly) if you have never used BI, there
is no way to know how this is supposed to work.

I want to propose a solution for this that would, in my eyes, be very
simple and intuitive and that would hopefully require few changes:

- Add an alpha value to the viewport color setting that any Cycles material
has anyway.
- Let this value control what is (was) controlled by the main alpha value
in BI materials
- Possibly activate the Display > Transparency checkbox by default as the
Alpha value would be at a default value of 1 and has no other effect.

To allow consistency across both engines, I actually think it would be
helpful to add a Viewport Color setting to BI materials, too (that is
synched), because the color you want in your material is more often than
not not what you want in the viewport, same goes for the alpha value. But
that's a different story altogether.

Thanks for reading.

Regards,

Julian