Embarrassingly Newbie Question

For the last three years, I’ve concentrated only on Blender Internal. Never really used Cycles until this last week.

In BI, I add an object, give it a material, change the color and bam! I can see the object’s color in the viewport in Viewport Shading > Solid mode.

But, I do the same thing in Cycles and I can’t see the object’s color unless I change Viewport Shading to Material or Rendered.

Is this normal or am I missing something?

See? I told you it was an embarrassingly newbie question. :o

And every tutorial I’ve tracked down, every manual entry, sheds no light on this.

Okay, I just found Material Properties > Settings > Viewport Color. The color has to be set there before it shows in the viewport? Seems redundant (as well as confusing and misleading) to have to set the shader color and the object’s viewport color. Isn’t there some way to set the color once for both?


That is correct. You can use the eye dropper tool to exactly match the color from the other picker if you want.

Thanks, jrboddie1. I was totally caught off guard by this. I can’t imagine what the reasoning was behind it. :rolleyes:

and right under it you can also control the alpha value
but also need to enable it in object panel!

happy bl

Where is this eye dropper tool, can´t find it. (Embarrassingly question too :evilgrin:) Please help anyway.

clock on the color and you’ll see the small color window appears then select the eye dropper!

happy bl

Here is a picture>


I actually prefer the way cycles does it. You can color code your viewport without it affecting the real thing.

And that makes it easy to go from ‘real’ colors to ‘color-coded’ colors by simply going back and forth from Solid to Material, rather than having to wrestle with changing colors on a whole crap-load of objects.

I knew there was a positive side to this (there usually is) but just hadn’t figured it out yet. Thanks! :slight_smile: