Maya -- Avoid sluggishness when many overlap UV shells are open in UV editor?

Alex_J

A workflow some of you may be familiar with is transferring normals from a big sphere to many cards.

Sometimes you want to open up the cards in UV editor, but if you have a lot it can take several minutes just to open the UV editor. And forget about doing any work in there.

Any way to avoid this? Say you wanted to adjust the UVs. IS the only way to adjust on a single object then duplicate? Or use instances?

throttlekitty

I've never ran into this (at least to this extreme), how many cards are you talking about here? Are you going in with heavy construction history? What processor are you on?

Alex_J

Processor is AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Six-Core processor.

Overlapping shells is cards for a fluffy bush... maybe several hundred stacked shells. I always had this issue working with hair cards as well.

No construction history at all.

throttlekitty

That's not many at all. If you're cool with posting the scene or sending it to me directly, I can take a look tomorrow to see if I spot anything. I'm not sure what to suggest at the moment.

Alex_J

I appreciate that.

But it looks like I have made error. Last night I looked at a current scene I was working in and guesstimated what I thought total cards would be for the problem scenes. I was way off. Overlapping UV shells become a problem when it gets to ~1,000.

Maybe that's still in range where we shouldn't have slow down, I dunno.

I attached zipped maya scene. At origin is three quad leaf card. Then I smooth a cube into a sphere, and paint-duplicate the leaf card onto the sphere. There is no history on the leaf cards, only their individual transform values.

The scene runs fine until I open UV editor, then it lags heavily if I have most or all of the cards selected. I use the UV editor as a panel, not a separate window.

Thanks for the help @throttlekitty !

throttlekitty

No slowdown here, it was instant when I had everything selected and opened the UV editor (panel or window). Moving all the points around is uncomfortable, but not terrible*. i7 4790k just for reference. I poked around the scene in maya and np++, I don't see anything out of the ordinary; just a plain old clean scene.

* I did get this error a couple times while moving uvs:
scripts/others/texturePanelMenus.mel line 2298: Object's name 'MpolyTexturePlacementPanel1UVSetTooManyObjects' is not unique.
Which led to this thread, and it's just Maya being Maya concerning the UI. Pretty sure I've worked on scenes with this many or more objects + uv editor without running into this, but whatever.

I do know that if I have symmetry turned on, it can slow things down for me. Googling around a bit just now, I see a few random but unhelpful threads about sluggish UV Editor performance, betting money it's people with 999+ items in the history stack. I see some reports of large textures + texture visible in the editor being problematic.

Sorry to say, I still don't know what to suggest, leaning toward differences in hardware. If someone else with a similar Ryzen chip chimes in, that would help. I don't know how much the GPU matters for UV/UI performance.

Alex_J

Very interestnig. Great investigation, I really appreciate it.

Total shot in the dark but I'm gonna see if changing my layout and menu preferences might do anything.

I'll also be getting a new computer later this year so I can check on alternate machine then as well.