Shortcut still works, but instead of creating viewer node for node it just connects it to material output. Which is awful, because every time I want to just delete the line instead of deleting viewer node and showing me principal BSDF that is connected to material output, it just shows nothing because nothing is inputted there anymore.
Is this a bug or a feature?
The “Viewer” node is just a renamed Emission node, so you can easily recreate it. Last I checked, sometimes the shortcut connects directly to the output and sometimes it makes a viewer node, I’m not sure what the pattern is though
I’ve updated to 3.4 today and never had this issue before. I would have to change my entire muscle memory and waste a lot of time if old setup is just straight-up gone
It’s sounds like you’re confusing Node Wrangler operations in the Shader Editor with those in the Compositor.
In the Shader Editor when you Shift-Ctrl click a node it gets piped into the Material Output. After previewing you Shift-Ctrl click the last node, BSDF or whatever it might be to re-connect the full tree to the Material Output.
In the Compositor, Shift-Ctrl clicking a node connects it to a Viewer node, to be previewed as a backdrop in the Compositor, or in the Image Editor (Viewer Node in the dropdown.) Shift-Ctrl clicking the last node re-connects the full tree to the Composite Node.
I’ve never used a compositor I’m not confusing anything. Node wrangler always used to create yellow viewer node (emission) above material output, which, upon deleting the line that connected it to node, deleted itself and node wrangler automatically returned bsdf output to material outputs Material input. That seems to not be a case anymore in 3.4
Yes this is correct. It still works like this sometimes, but not always, again, I haven’t been able to figure out the pattern
Hope this is a bug and not a feature. Its very frustrating when I’m working in groups and have to come out, find BSDF and connect to it every time I want to see full result
The viewer emission node was removed in this commit. It is not a bug.
I never had this behavior, when you delete the line connecting to the viewer node it just stays there without any input. The only time the viewer got deleted automatically is when you click to preview a node that is already a shader, like the principled BSDF, which in this case the behavior is the same in the new version.
Apologies for misunderstanding and implying confusion. I do vaguely remember that behavior in the shader editor. I just never deleted the line from that node to Material Output, instead having long been used to Shift-Ctrl clicking the final BSDF to reconnect to Material Output. I didn’t realize anything had changed.
That is very weird. Was that feature from some other add-on I was using? If I didn’t use it yesterday I would question my sanity.
Well, if that’s not a feature than it definitely should be
Concur with @AmyLily, I don’t recall ever seeing that “auto-reconnect after deleting line” behaviour. Since I had 3.1 up I checked just now, and indeed, it doesn’t reconnect anything automatically, it just leaves a lonely viewer node.
That’s weird; wonder what other add-on it would be since it’s not Node Wrangler. I only use Node Preview in addition, and that doesn’t do it (which also means I don’t often preview in the old way anymore because every node has its own little preview above).
Does node preview add-on use lot of memory?
I have an older laptop (i7-6700HQ w/ GTX 960M (2GB)) and I haven’t noticed any slowdown even with procedural shaders that clearly take a heavy toll all by themselves (something doesn’t have to get very complex for that to happen). But that’s an entirely subjective impression.
I had a quick look at memory statistics with a freshly loaded simple scene (UV sphere with an object-mapped Noise texture):
no Node Preview
total memory len: 27.641 MB
peak memory len: 27.908 MB
slop memory len: 14.325 MB
Node Preview
total memory len: 35.636 MB
peak memory len: 37.350 MB
slop memory len: 14.431 MB
I don’t know how to test this more specifically, if you do and tell me I’ll check it out.
I really like this add-on. It’s the only one I bought so far, and it was worth it to me even at its then higher price; it’s made it so much easier for me to study procedural shader development.
Hi, author of Node Preview here. I did a quick test with two scenes. Memory usage was measured with the task manager on Windows 11.
Simple scene (9 nodes):
Complex scene (137 nodes):
I got your addon. The ability to toggle it for some nodes is what I needed. I use it by turning it on and toggling it for output nodes to view changes in input nodes.