Autodesk 663B1-05A111-1001 User Guide - Page 170

9 | Performance tips How do I > Get the most out of Maya Basics 170 If you need to set up layers for visibility, splitting up into non-overlapping rectangular grid sectors should help. (Maya performs front, back, and side camera frustum culling per object. If even one triangle shows up, Maya draws everything.) • Use the new hardware Mipmap filtering options, which are in the Hardware Texturing section of the shader node, Texture Filter drop-down list. • Use the new Use default material display mode if applicable. • Don't use extra Shading menu settings like Wireframe on Shaded if you don't need them. • If possible, use Show > Isolate Select to limit what is displayed and refreshed in the scene. • Objects with less than a few hundred triangles, and especially those with only a few triangles will have a high performance overhead. If possible, merge the objects together into one. Maya performs much better with less objects that each have thousands of triangles versus many objects with only a few triangles. • Use instancing when possible. This includes instancing geometry, materials and textures. If using file texture nodes, it is better to have one file texture node that is instanced versus many copies of the node. This affects memory used when the file is loaded as well as on disk. • Make sure to set your video card settings to Maya settings and disable vertical sync (sync). • The default material display option can be used to see the difference between using 1 shader for all objects versus n shaders. • If surfaces are partitioned into many layers, this may slow down shaded mode display. Attempt to use fewer partitions if possible, and if used for visibility to partition the surfaces into grid sections. This helps with visibility culling. • Attempt to build surfaces that do not intersect each other in terms of their bounds (bounding boxes). Visibility testing performs worse in these cases. • Sorting of the DAG hierarchy by display attribute types may help. This can be done by reordering DAG objects in Outliner. • Ordering your DAG hierarchy may help: • all surfaces first, then all non-surfaces • by visibility within a given region (perhaps by layer if layers are used for visibility partitioning) • by depth to viewer (if feasible) • material and lighting attributes: for example, all lamberts, then all blinns, then all shaders which don't use lighting, then all those that do, and finally all shaders which don't have transparency, then all those that do • Use a minimal shader for an object. For example use a surface shader when you don't require lighting, or you'll be overriding lighting elsewhere, for example, with color per vertex. • Remove duplicate shading networks.