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.
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 continue 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:
Some cases of dynamics simulation, and non-linear animation, such as Trax, and XGen-related features do not support Cached Playback.
nParticles and
nCloth caching is supported by enabling
Cache dynamics. 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. Disable the
Smooth Mesh Preview option in the
Smooth Mesh area in the
Attribute Editor.
- 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
classic dynamics, (for example, particles, cloth, rigid bodies).
-
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: Disable
Cache Smooth Meshes in the
Cached Playback Preferences.
- 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.