Cached Playback limitations

When Cached Playback encounters unsupported nodes so it is unable to send the animation to memory, it enters Safe Mode. Safe Mode is indicated by the Cached Playback status line and icon turning yellow and caching is disabled. For more information on Safe Mode, see Cached Playback status line states.

Note: For more technical details on Cached Playback, see the Maya Cached Playback whitepaper.

If Cached Playback gets close to running out of memory, warning messages appear on the Help line. You can use the Range Slider to reduce the playback range or allocate more memory to the caching process in the Cached Playback Preferences. If the allocated memory limit is reached, caching is stopped, although you can conitue working.

You can open the Script Editor to view status messages or run the Safe mode tests in the Evaluation Toolkit Cached Playback section to locate the source of the problem.

Note: There is a setting in the Cached Playback Preferences, Show Warning Frames, that lets you disable the yellow Safe Mode notifications.

The following is a list of limitations for the Cached Playback workflow:

Drawing

Important:

Dynamics simulation, Non-linear animation (such as Time Editor, and Trax), and XGen-related features do not support Cached Playback. For a list of the unsupported nodes that disable the caching process, see Cached Playback unsupported nodes.

Supported

Animated visibility is supported, but does not take full advantage of the caching system. This may affect performance, since geometry with animated visibility might be recomputed instead of cached.
Animated geometry topology is supported, but does not take full advantage of the caching system. This may affect Performance, since geometry with animated topology might be recomputed instead of cached.

Unsupported

Caching Smooth Mesh Preview in Maya Catmull-Clark mode does not work correctly, However, Open Subdiv smoothing modes work with caching.
Switching display modes (wireframe versus polygons, smooth-shaded versus flat-shaded, and so on,) is unsupported. Once the display mode is changed, the cache needs to be rebuilt.

Workflow

Since Cached Playback relies on the Evaluation Manager (EM), any process that disables the EM also disables Cached Playback. This includes the use of Motion Blur, or when the scene contains certain classic dynamics, (for example, particles, cloth, rigid bodies).
Tip: You can run a script that returns a list of which dynamics nodes are causing problems with the Evaluation Manager. See Identify dynamics nodes that inhibit performance.
Cached Playback temporarily stalls when you move the camera view (for example, dollying, tumbling, orbiting or zooming). Workaround: Let the Cached Playback status line completely fill the Time Slider before changing the camera view.
Smooth Mesh Preview slows down Cached Playback significantly due to the amount of memory used by subdivided meshes. Workaround: Use the following Python script to disable smooth mesh preview for all meshes in your scene:
```
import maya.cmds as cmds

for mesh in cmds.ls(type='mesh'):
  cmds.setAttr('{}.displaySmoothMesh'.format(mesh), 0)
```
Evaluation graph topology changes do not trigger graph (and Playback Cache) rebuild. Rebuilding occurs only on the next evaluation, not the current one. This is because there might be changes in the current scene.
Releasing (or flushing) the cache may take a few moments, and cause Maya to pause, for example, when using File > New with a full cache.