Shading Pie

shortcut Page Up

Note

This default shortcut may seem odd, given how frequently the pie is used.
But if you can access Page Up using your mouse, it makes a lot of sense.

The Shading Pie is one of the most powerful and most used menus in MACHIN3tools.
It allows you to toggle all kinds of shading (viewport and object based) and overlay settings, without having to search for them in menus at the border of the view port, or in the properties panel.

Furthermore it facilitates quick shading type switching. Of note here, is that the pie supports overlay toggling per shading type, which means you can have overlays enabled for Solid shading, and have them automatically disable, when switching to Material shading for instance.

PieShadingSolid shading pie in solid shading, with overlays enabled

PieShadingMaterial shading pie in eevee powered material shading, with overlays disabled

Note

The shading pie allows you to adjust Eevee settings (see above) in Material shading, even when Cycles is set as the render engine, which is otherwise not possible natively in Blender.

PieShadingWire shading pie in wire shading, with overlays enabled

PieShadingRendered shading pie in rendered shading, with overlays disabled, and the render engine set to cycles

Preferences

The shading pie's MatcapSwitch tool has some settings in the addon preferences.

PieShadingPreferences

Tools

  • Shade Smooth in object and edit modes, optionally utilizing the Autosmooth angle + setting sharps based on it
  • Shade Flat in object and edit modes, optionally clearing all sharps
  • Autosmooth Angle Presets
  • Toggle Grid
  • Toggle Wireframe, globally as an overlay, or per object, or in edit mode using XRay to mirror 2.79s wire mode behavior, usefull to select through
  • Toggle ObjectAxes
  • Toggle Outline
  • Toggle Cavity
  • Toggle Curvature

  • Toggle Overlays

  • Matcap Switch, cycle between two predetermined matcaps

  • Colorize Materials, set material viewport colors from last node in material
  • Colorize from Active, set object viewport colros from active object
  • Colorize from Materials, set object viewport colros from material
  • Colorize from Collections, set object viewport colors based on collections

  • Colorize from Groups, set object viewport colors based on groups

  • 180° Studio Light Rotation

  • Eevee Presets

Using the Shading Pie