Get the most out of Maya

As a rule, Maya operates best when you use up to date graphics card drivers and hardware. You can check if your hardware is supported on the Maya Certified Hardware list.

Use the following best practices to optimize performance.

Interactive drawing

Memory

IK, Dependency Loops, and Performance

  • After loading a file, a wait cursor may come up and Maya will use all available CPU cycles for a long time (several minutes at least). This problem seems to occur in files that have IK and dependency loops.

    The ideal workaround is to find and remove the dependency loop. These loops may be difficult to find. For example, A may be translated by a pointConstraint B that uses target C that has a parent D that is rotated by an expression E that has an input from F that is constrained to G which is a child of A. One hint is to look for expressions that have outputs to attributes on many different nodes.

    That is, some complex scenes take a long time to evaluate, and you could encounter this when loading a file.

The Polygon Draw Cache

  • In Maya, the use of a polygon draw cache usually improves speed and performance. However, when loading certain very large files in Maya, the polygon draw cache may cause the memory usage of Maya to exceed the memory available to the application on your system, resulting in instability.

    (Note: The 64-bit version of Maya on Windows and Linux provides enough memory space that this issue should not arise.)

    You can also disable the polygon draw cache so that you can more easily load very large files. There is an environment variable called MAYA_DISABLE_POLYGON_DRAW_CACHE. Set it to 1 to disable the polygon draw cache.

    If you disable the polygon draw cache, interactive draw performance will be slower. We recommend that you not leave this environment variable set to 1, but instead set it only for working on files that show this problem.

Animation

Audio

Fur

Miscellaneous

Modeling

Dynamics

Classic Cloth

Rendering

Artisan

Paint Effects