Introducing MatCap and Ambient Occlusion

Since making more investment in a high-fidelity lighting setup in Blender no longer makes sense, we should perhaps investigate different ways to make our scenes look better. What we’ll do next still means what you see won’t be exported. However, it means you can look at models that no longer have the default and boring gray look. Why not? Working with things that look nice sometimes feels nicer and increases productivity. We’ll look at two techniques that will help you distinguish your models’ details.

MatCap

MatCap stands for material capture. We won’t get into the technicalities of how a MatCap is constructed but, suffice it to say, it’s a type of shader Blender uses internally to give a different look to the models. Normally, you’d need to switch to Material Preview mode to see how your materials would look on your models.

However, during the modeling process, you usually work in...