 Shading in Blender is a very important part of look development. In order to get beautiful colors and lighting, you're going to have to understand shaders. Let's start with the shading workspace. This workspace already tells us a lot about the shading workflow. To start off, the workspace automatically brings us into Look Dev mode in the viewport, a mode that approximates lighting with an environment texture to give the user a general idea of what their shader will look like without fully rendering it. The shader editor will display whatever shader nodes you have for the material of the object you have selected. You will notice that by default, if you select your default cube, there is already a basic shader node setup for you on your default cube's current material. Changing the values on this node setup should affect how your object looks in the 3D viewport above. To change which materials you are editing, simply go here to the slot number dropdown. This is synced to your material list in the materials tab in the properties editor. Simply select a different material slot in the list to change the material you are editing in the shader editor. You can also replace the material in the current slot with an existing material using the material dropdown to the right of it. If you only have one material here, you can actually add more materials by pressing the plus icon. You can then either select an existing material through this dropdown menu or click new to create a brand new material. Another way to create new materials is by duplicating existing materials. To do that, you can press the new material button, which looks like a stack of papers. Besides materials, the world also has a shader that affects the scene. To edit the world shader, simply change this dropdown menu from object to world. The file explorer here can be used at any time to navigate your hard drive for images and textures. To bring an image into your scene, simply left click drag the file from the explorer into any one of the three adjacent editors. Dragging an image file into the 3D viewport imports the image as a reference object. Dragging the image file into the shader editor will automatically add it as an image texture node. And dragging it into the image editor will display it for easy reference, annotation and basic editing. One important thing about the shading workflow is the different render engines. If you go into the render tab in the properties editor, you'll notice there is a render engine dropdown menu. Under this menu, you'll find EV, Cycles, and Workbench. These are Blender's three different kinds of render engines, and they will affect how your shaders will look at render. EV is Blender's real-time render engine. It is extremely powerful and can render physically-based shaders in real-time, similar to a game engine. However, Cycles is a powerful render engine that, while slower, has slightly more accurate lighting when compared to EV. Luckily, Blender shares nodes between EV and Cycles, allowing you to work seamlessly between the two without converting any shaders. That being said, keep in mind that the lighting will still be slightly different. Workbench is Blender's preview render engine. Let's say you're working on an animation, and you want to quickly render a preview animation instead of calculating all of the lighting and shaders. To do this, you can simply switch your render engine to Workbench and hit Render Animation. There is another way to do a preview render, which is to render your viewport, regardless of your render engine selected. You can simply go to View, Viewport Render. These options will render your viewport exactly as you see it. Now, some of you may notice that the Viewport Render output and the Workbench Render output look very similar. This is because Workbench is the same engine that drives SolidView. Some of you may be wondering now why the Workbench engine is an option when we already have Viewport rendering available. Well, the reason why Workbench exists as a selectable render engine is to separate the SolidView options and the render output options for your preview renders. That way, you can set a specific look for your preview renders, but change whatever you want while working in the viewport. The Workbench render engine also automatically hides display overlays and renders through your active camera. Quick note, if you want to change the color of a material in Workbench, you won't be using nodes. Instead, you can go to the Materials tab of the object and change its Viewport display color.