You can pause updates in Viewport 2.0, in the Material Viewer, and in other editors such as the UV Editor. This allows you to make changes in your scene without having to wait for the editors to update. This can be especially useful when you have a complex scene.
Click
in the Maya status line or in the
Material Viewer toolbar to pause updates. Paused editors appear with a red border and the text
Paused to indicate their paused state. If an image of the last cached render exists, the
Material Viewer displays this image in lieu of the text
Paused.
When you click
in the Maya status line, all editors that use the Viewport 2.0 renderer are also paused. This includes: the
Material Viewer (if it is set to use the hardware renderer), and the
UV Editor. If the Render View is set to use the Hardware 2.0 renderer, the render is also stopped. Likewise, these editors are also paused if you click
in the
Material Viewer while it is set to use the hardware renderer.
Click
again to lift the pause, and the scene is updated with all the changes made while paused. The contents of each affected panel are re-rendered and monitoring of scene updates resumes.
The hardware renderer and plug-in renderers are paused separately. Pausing Viewport 2.0 does not affect rendering with software renderers, including plug-in renderers. For example, you can still render using IPR in the Render View. When a plug-in renderer such as Arnold for Maya is chosen as the renderer in the Material Viewer, rendering can also be paused independently of Viewport 2.0.
A paused state is retained when you open a different scene, but the pause is lifted when you create a new scene.
If you have two renders occurring concurrently; for example, the
Render View and the
Material Viewer, starting an IPR render will suspend the
Material Viewer. As soon as the IPR render is stopped, the
Material Viewer is active again. However, you must manually trigger a re-render; for example, by changing an attribute value or the camera angle. This behavior is slightly different from clicking
, where a re-render always occurs when pause is lifted.
To pause Viewport 2.0 upon startup, set the environment variable MAYA_VP2_PAUSE_ON_STARTUP to 1, or set the optionVar vp2PauseState to 1.
You can also enable the Pause Viewport 2.0 (startup) option in the Display category of the Preferences window.