Cached Playback preferences

To turn off support for Dynamics Caching, disable the Cache dynamics option in the Cached Playback Preferences.

Cached Playback lets you see changes made to animation immediately, rather than needing to create a Playblast. You also activate caching by clicking the Cached Playback icon in the Playback Options, next to the Time Slider.

For more about Cached Playback and how to use it, see Use Cached Playback to increase playback speed.

Cached Playback

Activates Cached Playback. The Cached Playback options are active only when this option is on.

% of RAM

Move the slider to specify a cut-off point when the cache process will stop. Use this setting to specify how much memory (in percent) to dedicate for Cached Playback purposes (and not all of Maya).

Note: This setting affects Cached Playback only. However, increasing this setting may affect other processes running on the computer running at the same time. Also, running multiple Maya sessions using Cached Playback may also impact performance if too much memory is allotted.

Stop caching at memory limit

Activate this option to abandon the cache process when the designated memory limit is reached (this is the default setting).

If Cached Playback is producing warnings about memory limits, you can disable this option to override the specified memory limit so that caching can continue. (Be aware that disabling this option may cause caching to use all your system’s available memory.)

See the Memory Management area in the Evaluation Toolkit Caching section to view your system's memory status.

Preferred Mode

Choose how to use Cached Playback makes use of your system resources. There are three modes:

Evaluation cache: A viewport/renderer independent, universal cache mode, a good choice if you are unsure of which mode to use. This mode is slower than other modes but available for Viewport 1.0
Viewport Hardware cache: Uses your graphics card memory to increase performance.
Viewport Software cache: Uses your system's memory to increase performance.

Hybrid Cache

This setting lets you extend Caching Playback to mixed with GPU deformation to improve caching with scenes that rely on heavy GPU computation and large rigs.

Note: This mode also turns on the GPU Override setting. However, if you disable it, it does not turn off GPU Override.

Instead of caching full geometry after deformation, Hybrid Cache retains and restores the input to the GPU deformation chain. Typically this results in less data being stored, given that the input to the deformer chain (a few matrices, a few animated parameters, and so on,) is usually much smaller than the geometry being deformed. This also caches the original undeformed static geometry only once for the whole animation and leaves it on the GPU, resulting in smaller transfers between CPU and GPU memory.

The fact that geometry stays on the GPU can result in great performance gains, especially for large geometries, as well as significant memory usage reduction.

Setting	Behavior
Disabled	Hybrid Cache is not used, geometries are cached normally. This setting is the default.
Smooth Mesh Preview	Hybrid Cache only applies to GPU-deformed evaluation clusters with at least one mesh using Smooth Mesh Preview.
All	Hybrid Cache applies to all GPU-deformed evaluation clusters.

Prevent Frame Skipping

Activate this option when you are playing back in Real-time (see the Playback section in the Time Slider preferences) to make sure that Maya does not skip frames while it builds the playback Cache.

Normally, when you play back animation in Real-time playback speed, Maya skips frames to maintain the rate. But if you intend to use Cached Playback, you do not want any frames to be left out; using this option prioritizes filling the cache, and lets the cache build smoothly without skipping frames.

Note: Once the caching is complete and the Time Slider is filled, frame skipping is active again if cached playback still cannot achieve the requested frame rate.

Show warning messages

Activate this option to display support messages in the script editor whenever an event occurs that disables or causes problems with caching. See Cached Playback Limitations and Cached Playback unsupported nodes for more information on conditions that can disable Cached Playback.

Discard frames outside playback range

Activate this option to flush any cached data from frames that fall outside of the current playback range. This means that if you resize your playback range so that some cached frames no longer fall within the active caching area, their caching data is lost.

Cache Smooth Meshes

Choose how Cached Playback handles Smooth Mesh Preview. When active, Smooth Meshes are cached. Disable this setting if Smooth mesh preview creates performance issues when Cached Playback is enabled. This setting is off by default.

By default, meshes automatically display with Smooth Mesh Preview turned off. When Smooth Mesh Preview is turned on, you can display the original mesh and a smoothed preview simultaneously (Cage + Smooth Mesh display mode) or the smoothed preview by itself (Smooth Mesh display mode).

Cache dynamics

Lets you disable caching of dynamics (nCloth and nParticles). The Dynamics cache is shown as a separate status line from the default Cached Playback Status Line. See Cached Playback status line states for a description of each status line and what it represents.

The pink dynamics status line and default blue animation status line.

This setting is active by default.

Note: Changes to the appearance of the Cache Playback status line affect both the Animation and Dynamics caching stripe.

Cache Fill

Choose when the cache is built.

Playback & Background: Triggers Cached Playback when you press Play and when the scene is idle. This setting is the default.
Playback: Triggers Cached Playback only when playing animation.
Background: Cached Playback triggers automatically without pressing Play.
Note: This mode does not trigger caching on playback. The only difference between this mode and Playback & Background mode is that when you use this mode, the cache builds in the background only. It does not build during playback.

Background Fill direction

Sets where on the Time Slider the cache begins loading.

Forward & Backward: Builds the cache in both directions from the current frame. This setting is the default.
Forward: Builds the cache from the current frame forward on the Time Slider.
Backward: Builds the cache from the current position toward the animation start (from right to left) on the Time Slider.
Forward from animation start: Builds the cache from the beginning of the animation onward on the Time Slider.

Show Cached Playback Status

This section lets you customize the position and appearance of the Cached Playback status line.

Note:

If you unload the "cacheEvaluator" plugin, these controls are disabled.
You can change the color of the cache status line in the Cached Playback section of the Color Settings.

Show cache status

Displays the Cached Playback status line on the Time Slider.

Position

Choose where you want the Cached Playback status line to appear on the Time Slider.

Above Timeline
Below Timeline

Height

Sets the thickness of the Cached Playback status line.

Cached Playback status line size 1 and size 13

Vertical spacing

Sets the gap between the Time Slider border and the Cached Playback status line.

Cached Playback status line spacing at 10

Show invalidated frames

Activate if you want to see the frames that are in need of updating on the status line.

Cached Playback status line with invalidated frames

Every time you change the animation, the Cached Playback status line turns the affected frames a darker shade of blue. When this option is active, you can see where your changes have occurred and what areas the cache is redrawing.

The frames can be in these 3 states:

Uncached (shown as an empty area in the status line)
Already cached (shown as a paler shade of blue in the status line)
Partially cached (shown as a darker shade of blue)

The Show invalidated frames checkbox acts on frames that are in the 3rd state (Partially cached).

These kinds of partially invalidated frames are faster to compute than uncached frames.

See Cached Playback status line states for more on Cached Playback Invalidation.

Show subframes

Activate to draw cached subframes instead of the entire frame range. White subframes appear whenever the Time Slider displays fractional framerates, such as 0.5, or 0.25. The white subframes appear to let you know that activity on fractional frames has been cached.

Cached subframes shown with a playback range of 0.5

Displaying cached subframes uses more memory than default (non-subframe) caching, so it's recommended to use this setting only when troubleshooting. If you do not want subframes to be cached, adjust cache setup so that whole frames are being cached so you won't run out of caching memory.

Note: If there are many subframes cached and the Time Slider is zoomed out, subframes may not look different from the normal Cached Playback status line. Zoom in to see detail.

Show warning frames

Activate this option to make the Cached Playback status line turn yellow whenever caching is disabled because it has run out of memory or is in Safe Mode. Disable this option if you want to turn off the warning color so that only uncached frames are shown on the Time Slider and warning status is shown on the icon and script editor messaging. See Safe Mode in the Cached Playback status line states topic for more information.