Thanks for the great tutorial Jonathan!
I am using Blender 2.8 and I'm having a difficult time replicating the shading that you have in your display. I have been experimenting a bit but can't seem to find a clean non-messy shading type in 2.8. You say you use wireframe mode instead of xray, or the 2.7x-equivalent, but wireframe looks like this for me (see image below). It displays all mesh objects equally, edited or otherwise. The mirrored mesh displays the same as the "origin" mesh as well, unlike yours, where it is fully transparent with wires. It's not easy to focus on the right vertices, faces or lines, this way. Enabling On Cage for the shrinkwrap helped remove some of the double lines though, so that was a welcome tip!
Your viewport has semi-transparent shading on the edited mesh, full transparency on the non-edited mesh and mirror. Can this be replicated in 2.8?
Hey Eirik, I don't think the exact shading can be replicated, but I think there are a couple of decent options. Here is wireframe by default and like you said it looks like a mess:
The first option is to use x-ray at a low value instead of wireframe:
The second option is to use a theme that has dark edit mode wires but light object mode wires:
I hope that helps!
Thanks, I'll definitely try out your dark_minimal theme! Differing appearance on edited and non-edited mesh seems to be key to keep my eyes from hemorrhaging.
Also, I found that it was the show-while-editing on the shrinkwrap modifier that caused the mirrored side to still show the same as the original side of the mesh. Turning that off made it fade into the background, like your middle image.