I've spent over 2 hours trying to figure out how to see the effects of the shader nodes in the viewport. (I checked the Nodes link Lobo suggested, and didn't see it, and none of the tutorials bother to mention it.) I'm following a sword tutorial by Blender Fast Track, and I can see the sword object in the viewport, blade selected, but it retains a dull white look rather than showing the metallic texture and the other effects that are being demonstrated. I'm in Shading, Material Preview, Object Mode. The preview in the right panel has the same effect. The nodes seem to be fine. Any ideas? I think I had this problem in the old Blender, but couldn't find the answer in my notes either.

You need to enable the Node Wrangler addon in your preferences. Once it is enabled, all you have to do is CTRL+SHIFT click on any node attached to your shader, and it will engage a viewer node automatically, which will allow you to see the effect of that node in the viewport.

Which render do you have set as default? And if you can tell me what part of the tutorial your on like the time stamp and a screen shot of your screen then maybe I can see what is missing I am sure it is something easily missed like not having something checked off in the right place

Lobo3433 posted at 11:10AM Mon, 17 February 2020 - #4380768

Which render do you have set as default? And if you can tell me what part of the tutorial your on like the time stamp and a screen shot of your screen then maybe I can see what is missing I am sure it is something easily missed like not having something checked off in the right place

Yeah, Lobo is correct. Disregard my previous suggestion. Upon re-reading the issue, it seems to be something more than just viewing independent nodes in the viewport. It seems to be an overall display issue. It could be related to the GPU driver version as well. Considering the strange problems you were having with Blender before this, I have a feeling there's something corrupted on the system.

Well, it SEEMS to be working today (?) Node Wrangler had already been turned on; render set for Eevee. We couldn't find any problems with the system, but that doesn't mean there isn't something hiding there. Going to watch it closely and see what happens.

Thank you both!

VolcanicMink posted at 5:59PM Mon, 17 February 2020 - #4380834

Well, it SEEMS to be working today (?) Node Wrangler had already been turned on; render set for Eevee. We couldn't find any problems with the system, but that doesn't mean there isn't something hiding there. Going to watch it closely and see what happens.

Thank you both!

Very welcome! I'm so happy to hear you got it working. Hopefully, there is no underlying issue like a virus at play there. Just keep an eye on things going forward. It could have been something as simple as a misbehaving GPU driver or even a missing system driver causing havoc with your software. It could have also been a .blend file you opened which contained a corrupt UI workspace, or a UI from some experimental build of Blender.

Once you have your Blender UI set up exactly as you like it, I might suggest you go into Preferences > Save &Load > and UNcheck the LoadUI box (it is checked on by default). Then save preferences. This will prevent Blender from automatically loading any customized viewport configurations that are in the .blend files you might open. The benefit of this is that you will not open a .blend file that has been shared or previously saved which may inadvertently alter your current Blender viewport configuration. There is an option to do this each time you load a .blend file, but often times people forget to uncheck this when they open a .blend, and their UI switches over to that configuration automatically. The UI can always be reset back to default factory settings, but if you never want the need to do that, then unchecking it in preferences is optimal.

Just a suggestion that might help going forward. Once you've disabled that feature, you shouldn't see your UI change unless you manually did it yourself. Good luck.

Sometimes I think something hasn't worked but then I notice that it's still compiling the shader - so it changes to pure white in the viewport for a little while (seconds that feel like minutes ).

I know on occasions I start working on something and things do not look right save my work restart Blender and everything is working as I expect I usually notice issues after a Windows update always seem to cause glitches in everything else

Windows updates could cause problems especially if there are device drivers on the system that are outdated or not up to a minimum spec. I noticed this after updating one machine I had in my network from Win 7 to Win 10. The biggest problem came from the old Nvidia card I had in the machine. It was a very old GTX card (500 series). Windows 10 would have been ok with it, and in fact, did support it in a later build, but initially, it wouldn't work properly with old 500 series GTX drivers which used an old version of DirectX that Windows had dumped. I don't blame Windows entirely for that this time though. Nvidia wasn't updating their 500 series drivers anymore at the time, and so I couldn't get any new DX support for it that Win10 would accept. Thankfully, the latest version of the GTX drivers worked ok with it, enough to allow me to install Win10.

The laptop is useless to me for Blender now, though, because Blender GPU (Nvidia) support will not recognize the card as CUDA. Blender 2.8 seems to not support a GTX 560M for some reason, even though the 2.8x specs claim to have support for Nvidia cards as old as the Geforce 200 series. Blender still works, mind you, I just can't render anything with GPU hardware acceleration. Even though Octane engine can still see the CUDA cores, Cycles can not.

I don't really care too much because it's not my primary workstation (I have an RTX 2070 and a GTX 1070 TI on my desktop workstations). But it would have been nice to have Blender on this old Asus laptop just for mobile purposes.

I noticed this recent update of Windows that is causing profile issues that they are suggesting you uninstall update KB4532693 because it is actually hiding whole or partial profile files seems to be effecting more than just the Windows profile which it is suppose to delete it self and is not once I uninstalled it my Blender was back to acting normally now this is only affecting some Window 10 users not all but still something to be aware that sometimes Window updates can cause issues especially after Tuesdays since that is when they typically release bug fixes in Windows