Hey all, one thing I’ve found while working with 2.8 is that I’m often toggling between Eevee and Cycles to find the right settings.
For example, I’m working on a model and am previewing it in Look Dev to make quick changes. Everything looks great, but one of the textures needs transparency. I’m rendering it out using Cycles, so I actually don’t get the transparency options in the material properties:
Once I switch the rendering engine to Eevee, I get the option to set the blend mode, and then I can switch back to Cycles again:
This isn’t just relevant to transparency though, because all of the Look Dev settings can only be changed when the render engine is set to Eevee.
My suggestion, so that we can work with both at the same time, is to put all of the Eevee material options into the Viewport Display section (or a new Look Dev section) of Cycles materials, and all of the Eevee rendering options into the World and View Layer Viewport Display panels.
The most common ones to toggle (AO, SSR, SSS, Shadows, etc…) could be placed in the Look Dev Shading popover for easy access, though that part might not work as they are scene dependent and not viewport dependent.
However it works out though, I don’t think it makes sense to need to swap final output engines to adjust Look Dev behavior.