I’m reviewing Grant’s lecture 67: Scene & animation adjustments. Its about, amongst other things, adding a background to the spitfire scene.
At about 3:32, Grant uses node wrangler to add extra nodes in the shader editor to give the world a background.
Node wrangler adds 3 extra nodes.
The leftmost 2 of those extra 3 seem unnecessary. Deleting them makes no difference.
Why is node wrangler bothering to add them?
Node wrangler is an add-on to speed up making materials. The shortcut is specifically designed to add these nodes since this is the most common texture mapping setup. They let you adjust the position, rotation, and scale of a texture based on different object data.
For the world, texture rotation is the most relevant one since it lets you adjust which direction the sun will light your scene.
If you wanted to just add an image texture you could just open the search menu and type “image” and select the image texture.
I would assume Grant used the shortcut since these nodes don’t really cause any harm by just being there and maybe he is planning to use them later.
I do find it a bit strange to add an HDRI that way, I usually do it through world settings on the right but to each their own lol, it’s not like either way is wrong.
ok, thanks. Maybe those wrangler default choices will seem natural once I’m more familiar with the available nodes.
Just tested it and they do make a difference. Not very useful differences but all the same different. Like upside down!
I suspect it is just made to work the same as the image texture, you seemingly can get away with out it, but it is ‘normal’ to have it. Really no problem having it if it is doing nothing.
@NP5 My screenshots above look identical. Nothing that I’d describe as upside down. Could you post an image what what your test is showing?
Are you sure you didn’t change something? 
That just shouldn’t be happening. Also, it’s actually more normal not to have them. Blender doesn’t add them in by default when you set an environment texture, but they also shouldn’t be doing anything if the mapping node is in the default state.
Yes I was testing it to see what happened. Reflection turns it upside down, camera points at the sky for me, might depend on camera position. Window is weird streaky great effect for something disappearing into infinity. UV goes a blank colour presumable selected form some part of the hdri. Normal turns it upside down.
You’re using Normal coordinates instead of Generated which are default.
Yes. So there is a reason behind adding it! People may want the control to do something different.
Yeah, they may want their sky upside down am I right ;'D
But the point was I thought, why does Node Wrangle add it, if it does nothing?
It does do something. So that may be why it adds it. Lots of times you ‘can’ not use it, but the Node wrangler shortcut still adds it in.
Ah, I misinterpreted what you were saying lol. Yeah you’re right there is a point to having it, though node wrangler is not that smart. It just adds these three nodes with each other because you use them together most of the time, it doesn’t really do any checks on if it’s useful ot not. They’re just budled under a shortcut.
I actually used camera and window for making this “parallax” effect before.
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