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:
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 Creative.
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 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.
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.
You can disable swatch generation when starting Maya Creative so that swatches are not rendered in any of the Node Editor, Hypershade and Attribute Editor.
When this setting is disabled, the toggle swatch generation setting in the Hypershade is set to when you start Maya Creative.
When this setting is enabled, the toggle swatch generation icon in the Hypershade is set to its last saved state.