For more information on Hypershade tabs, see Hypershade Browser.
When you select Tabs > Current Tab while the current tab is a disk tab or the default Projects tab, the following options become available:
The tab displays only the directory lists.
The tab displays only the file icons.
The tab displays both the directory lists and the file icons in a split panel.
The tab refreshes the list display.
The tab refreshes the selected swatches. This applies to disk tabs in Hypershade.
The tab refreshes all the swatches. This applies to disk tabs in Hypershade.
In the Project and custom disk tabs of Hypershade you can right-click a file and select Refresh Swatch to refresh that file swatch.
When you navigate to a directory containing images in a disk tab (such as the default Projects tab), Hypershade reads each image file from disk and displays a swatch that represents it. Reading every image file and creating a swatch takes time, particularly for directories containing large image files and, or many image files, or over a network.
Once the swatches for the image files are created and displayed, you can use the Generate Swatch Files for Current Images menu item to save them. Now, every time you navigate to the same directory in Hypershade, the display updates much faster since Hypershade no longer has to read each image file—it can read the saved swatches instead.
The swatch files are saved in a .mayaSwatches subdirectory of the directory containing the images, and the names of the swatch files correspond to the names of the image files. For example, for an image file called earth.tif, the .mayaSwatches subdirectory contains a file called earth.tif.swatch.