See shading and lights in a scene view

Hardware texturing, which you can easily turn on or off, lets you see approximations of the textures, lights and objects in your scene.

Note: If you are using a file texture that uses the Mirror U and Mirror V attributes and the resolution of the hardware rendered texture in the scene view appears degraded, use the following environment variable:

MAYA_HW_FILE_TEXTURE_RESOLUTION_OVERRIDE

To see textures, lights, and objects in a view port

1. In the scene view, select Shading > Smooth Shade All.
2. Select Shading > Hardware Texturing (or press the hotkey 6).
3. Do any of the following (optional):
   • To use all lights in the scene, select Lighting > Use All Lights (or press the hotkey 7).
   • To see a more accurate preview result (which may take a little longer), adjust the Hardware Texturing attributes in the object’s material’s Attribute Editor.
     Note: When you play an animation with just Hardware Texturing turned on, each of the necessary file textures are read in one at a time and the animation speed is choppy.

     Use Interactive Sequence Caching Options to load file textures into memory only once for faster interactive animation (but this uses a lot of memory).