Maya -- Tip for speeding up a sluggish quad draw tool

Alex_J

I originally posted this as a question, but found the solution myself. So here's a PSA : 

If you are struggling with a sluggish quad draw tool in Maya, break the mesh you are building into separated meshes. Just that easy, and your tool works without lag anymore. You can have a million vertices in the scene, doesn't matter. Only thing that seems to lag the tool is the number of polygons currently editable by the quad draw tool. So, again, just separate your faces out into a new mesh object occassionally, and your quad draw tool stays fast. 

I've seen a ton of complaints about this tool on these forums and at autodesk forums, but I haven't seen a reliable solution explained anywhere. Hopefully this helps somebody.

throttlekitty

Turning off history helps a ton too, as does occasionally deleting UVs should any get started and begin to grow.

Zack Maxwell

throttlekitty said:

Turning off history helps a ton too, as does occasionally deleting UVs should any get started and begin to grow.

I was about to say the same; Quad-Draw builds up a history over time, and you have to occasionally clear it or it gets slower and slower.

Alex_J

I didn't even think about the UV creation -- perhaps that is part of the problem as well. 

But there does seem to be a point at which, even if you are following these best practices (turning off history, or occasionally clearing it out), the tool simply bogs down regardless. For my machine, that happens around 5k polygons (and I aint got a potato). Gets to where dragging out a single new polygon takes a second or two of thinking. Very annoying. 

So, I got tired of this and started looking around for a solution, but beyond "clear the history or turn it off," and other typical Maya fix alls like "reset prefs", I didn't find anything that made a noticeable difference. I tried everything thing I could think of, and my final solution was to come here and ask. A minute after posting my question, I realized there was one thing that I had not tried yet.... 

I've tested it out with different meshes -- with up to a million tri's in a scene (which is usually enough to make maya just general slow)-- and so long as I keep the quad draw mesh not more than a few thousand polys, it works flawlessly. So I think the single biggest factor in slow-down has got to be due to the tool reading every single vertex belonging to the quad draw mesh each time you drag out a new one. 

Anyway, thanks for the additional tips guys! 

throttlekitty

@BIGTIMEMASTER What's your processor? I've done a number of meshes around 40k-100k verts with no problem. The biggest I've worked with in QD was a little over 4 million verts and I found it surprisingly responsive. Add/Remove a loop would only take ~5 seconds or less, which was reasonable. i7-4790k here, I think I was on a GTX980ti then, but I'm unsure how the tool relates to GPU usage.

And yeah, Maya probably has optimizations in there, but generally it would need to walk the vertex index.

Alex_J

Maybe not as powerful as some professionals computers, but I generally don't have any issues with this setup. 

oglu

Convertig the highpoly to a GPU cache does also help.
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2018/ENU/Maya-ManagingScenes/files/GUID-907BB76E-1A01-4A29-B2FA-659B7CDA7BC4-htm.html

And turning off the construction history.
Its the clock icon in the the status line.

Alex_J

oglu said:

Convertig the highpoly to a GPU cache does also help.

I'll give that a go with my next retopo project and see how it goes. Actually, I'm doing some xgen work at the moment...  this may help as well...

@oglu , converting the hi-poly mesh to an allembic cache allowed me to work with a much higher poly count. Typically I try to reduce the hi to around 200-400k, but just to test this out I worked with a mesh at ~900k. Along with breaking the quad draw mesh into pieces, this allowed me to work as fast as I could click. Of course, decimating an object a little further isn't a big deal, but I could see this being a big help to anybody with a lower-end machine, or perhaps a very large scene. Great tip!

Checking out GPU-caches. Here's more specific info about using them for retopo work:
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2018/ENU/Maya-Modeling/files/GUID-6121F248-5E15-4E42-AFC5-427CBCF540B3-htm.html