Aside from having to re-familiarize myself with Blender and the versions that have come out recently, I found myself running into issues that seemed to pertain to my chip set. My current laptop has AMD Radeon graphics and is not – strictly speaking – a “gaming computer.”

The problem: Materials weren’t showing up in materials view. Rather, I was seeing a blank black space where the material should be. I knew the material was mapped correctly because I could see it in the render preview, but not otherwise.

When I asked Google, I wound up with a whole bunch of answers; none of which solved the problem. I read posts about downloading special add-ons that would allow Blender to see my graphics card as a CUDA card. I read posts about turning off scene lighting and material view.

Turns out, the culprit was much more mundane and might be something no one else runs into. But if you have the same problem (materials not displaying at all in material view), you might want to double-check your material output settings in the shader.

The material output node has a drop box. The drop box for my node had “Cycles” listed as the type of output selected. Changing that to “All” allowed my materials to display properly without any other changes to the project, or to Blender in general.

I haven’t tested it in 5.X yet, but I suspect the same fix will solve the problem in both places. Also, I don’t know if I will need to change that box back to “Cycles” when actually baking textures. I suspect not, but it’s a possibility. I’ve simply never had problems with materials displaying before, so it through me for a loop.

At any rate, I Hope this proves helpful.