Viewport 2.0 and Hypershade are dreadful.

[MannaTheBerserk]

Hi everybody,

Is there any chance of Maya viewport getting on par with other applications viewports, performance and quality wise?

The fact that this part of Maya still has a version number attached to it just makes me think it's a constant work in progress, and not a good one.

I find myself having to wait for that annoying "processing" message, and not being able to do anything else in the meantime, than doing actual work.

I am sorry to say this, but Maya viewport just doesn't cut it.

It used to be fast and responsive back in the days (that is when Alias|Wavefront owned the software, or just after Autodesk acquired it), with almost next to no performance issues.

Same goes for Hypershade. More often than not I have to use Node Editor in order for the software to behave efficiently. When I use Hypershade I keep it to the bare minimum: no material preview, no swatches (only names), and it's still not perfect (in fact, far from it).

Recently I have even found out that the UV Editor starts to impact the viewport responsiveness tremendously whenever I switch the checkerboard (which I use very often of course) on and start selecting, for example, UV Shells (every click of the mouse produces a blue "thinking" circle, until I switch off the checkerboard).

Are there any plans to improve, or even completely rewrite these painful tools?

I was looking at other Autodesk software viewports last day (3DS Max, VRED, to name few) and I was surprised by how much much better those are.

End of the rant. Apologies for it if you find it unnecessary.

Best regards,

Mauro (a veteran Maya user since 1998)

[Christoph_Schaedl]

Thats why lookDevX and Hydra is in the works.

And the other thing is big studios (yes we artists dont care about that) do work on massive data sets. Its near impossible to load all data into the viewport. Therefore they dont do it. Just as an example Renderman shader never worked in the viewport cause its impossible to recreate a 200+ node network for a realtime engine. And on the other side is that USD pipelines only use Maya for creation and something else for preview or rendering.

Im with you we need better viewport tech. But as mentioned above Hydra could fix it.

[MannaTheBerserk]

I know that. I am in the process of moving to USD/MaterialX, which works really well in Maya, but that's only as a side task, given I also need to work 🙂

I work in the automotive industry (Visualization), I know what you mean regarding the massive data sets and it's a bit painful

That transition that Autodesk is making is nice, but for the time being those issues are there and they are incredibly annoying.

[Christoph_Schaedl]

They wont fix outdated stuff.

For automotive you could try to find someone who is able to compile the Aurora render engine for Hydra.
Here is the source code.
https://github.com/Autodesk/Aurora