When working on a large scene in Autodesk Maya, managing your system’s resources can be key where every little bit helps. here, Escape Studios provides a quick-tip showing how to disable the color swatch preview in the hypershade to speed things up.

Have you nearly finished your project? Is your poor computer grinding to a halt? Don’t worry, Ash has a Python script that can help.

By using a handy little Python script that will disable the swatches from updating every time there is a change, which on smaller scenes doesn’t seem like much, however you will see a huge difference in performance on larger scenes using tons of shaders.

import maya.cmds as cmds
swatchState= cmds.renderThumbnailUpdate(q=True)
if swatchState == 0:
cmds.renderThumbnailUpdate (1)
print(“\nSwatches turned ON”)
else:
cmds.renderThumbnailUpdate (0)
print(“\nSwatches turned OFF”)