Jarred Love Covers Working With Evaluation Speed Tests Using Maya’s Evaluation Toolkit.

Working with a node-based playground ensures that you are always able to create what you want. It might not be the most efficient, but you can usually get it done. Working with Maya, you can test the performance of your rigs to make some evidence-based decisions on setups. Using the Evaluation toolkit, Rigging Artist, and technical Animator Jarred Love walks through how to test the speed difference between two different configurations.

A while back, Jarred showed how to create a constraint system using Matrix nodes in Maya, suggesting the setup was faster and more efficient than Maya’s own. Now Jarred provides the proof, using Maya’s Evaluation Toolkit to provide the data. “I’ve been asked a few times how much faster matrix node networks can be over Maya’s innate constraint system,” Jarred says. “So I thought it might be a good video to show how you can do a speed test to compare two similar ways to rig something.”

The Evaluation Toolkit lets you analyze and better understand how to best use parallel evaluation modes to speed up animation. The output from the window contains information that you can use to manipulate all aspects of the Evaluation Manager, including enabling debugging modes and output.