Link Juggling Removed

From the commit logs:

(r61178Lukas Toenne)
Removed the automatic “link swapping” feature from the node link operator: When a link was being dragged to an already connected input, the existing links were shifted to the next free socket.

This was originally intended as a way to speed up workflow for math and mix nodes, but more often than not it just gets in the way. Most binary (or n-ary) functions are not even commutative, i.e. changing the order of sockets does not usually produce the correct result.

Also this includes the more common case where one actually wants to replace a socket, which then requires a second click to remove the shifted connection.

All in all this is not a helpful feature.

I think we can all agree this is a change for the better :)

Sure there are some times where it’s useful, but it’s mostly just annoying. If you really miss it, fear not, in the next release of Node Wrangler there’ll be a feature for all you lazy bastards.

Commit 58930: OSL performance increase

Just from the mailing list, OSL texture performance has been improved be 10-25%

Hi fellow cyclists,

I did a little experiment to try and improve the performance of cycles/OSL in scenes that use image textures. I tested the Barcelona scene from ba.org and tried a bit of an ugly hack to cache the OIIO perthread info.

I only have an ancient macbook pro here with me on holiday and would need to investigate further but initial results are a ~ 15% improvement on overall render time on this scene.

I expect the improvement to be bigger for machines with more cores but I cannot test that from here.

I attached the patch

-Martijn Berger

It may only have such a big performance for OSX, though probably at least a little for Windows and Linux