If you have a lot of materials and textures in your scene, you can avoid waiting for swatches to render by toggling on and off swatch generation.
You can toggle on
and off
swatch generation in the following areas:
- Materials and Textures tabs in the Hypershade Browser
- Attribute Editor
- Nodes in the shader graph in the Hypershade work area
The Material Viewer is not affected by this setting.
The state of the toggle is saved with your preferences, and is retained when you start a new scene and when you restart Maya.
Only swatches that are at or below the maximum resolution are rendered. You can set the maximum resolution for swatches in the Preferences window. (In the Display category, set the Max res. for swatches preference.)
To pause swatch generation using the Hypershade icons
To toggle on and off swatch generation for all nodes, click the
and
buttons in the
Hypershade toolbar.
When swatch generation is toggled off, you can enable swatch rendering for a specific node in your shader graph by right-clicking and selecting Refresh Swatch from the marking menu.
To pause swatch generation using scripting
You can also toggle on and off swatch rendering by setting the renderThumbnailUpdate command to true or false. Refresh the swatch for a particular node by specifying the node name using the -forceUpdate flag.
See the renderThumbnailUpdate command documentation for more information.
Disable swatch rendering when starting Maya
You can disable swatch generation when starting Maya so that swatches are not rendered in any of the Node Editor, Hypershade and Attribute Editor.
- Select Window > Settings/Preferences > Preferences to open the Preferences window.
- Under the
Display category, disable
Render swatches (startup).
When this setting is disabled, the toggle swatch generation setting in the Hypershade is set to
when you start
Maya.
When this setting is enabled, the toggle swatch generation icon in the Hypershade is set to its last saved state.