Geometry Caching

You can save your Polygon mesh, NURBS (including curves) surface, and Subdivision Surface deformations (skin and non-skin) to a server or local hard drive by caching your object’s deformations to a geometry cache. Geometry caches are special Maya files that store vertex transformation data. They are useful when you want to reduce the number of calculations Maya performs when playing back or rendering scenes that contain many deforming objects, and they allow you to easily mix and edit your object’s deformations in an intuitive, nonlinear manner.

With geometry caches, you can also exchange point data through the Autodesk® FBX® plug-in with other supported software packages (for example, new versions of Autodesk® 3ds Max®).

You can use geometry caches to do the following:

• Cache Blend Shapes so that you can further modify their deformations by replacing or deleting geometry cache frames.
• Cache a character’s high resolution skin with many deformations to speed up the playback or rendering of its scene.

You can create geometry caches for your objects from the Cache menu in the Animation menu set, and edit them from the Attribute Editor or the Trax Editor. When creating a cache, select from the following Maya cache formats:

• mcx files use 64-bit indices and can be larger than 2.0 GB.

  Use the mcx file format to cache large animations.

• mcc files use 32-bit indices and cannot be larger than 2.0 GB.