Maya Tips 12: Don't kill your GPU. Manage your assets

This might be short like a quickie post but trust me, this should be very helpful.

Here's a tip for animators working with computers who's components haven't been upgraded in a LONGTIME:

Manage your assets so you don't stress your System.

This is actually something my VFX Instructor Christopher Pettigrew said to my class during my time in College back in my Spring 2022 Semester.

While this advice had more to do with Managing how heavy VFX can stress out your GPU,

this can also have an effect with your workflow too. Especially with Laptops who's RTX or Radeon chipsets might not be optimal for your workflow.

One thing we've done in MAYA is to reference the assets.

It's sort of like importing them into your workspace but instead of actually importing all the data into a single MAYA File, it actually references the .mel data into your scene and builds it from there.

My guess is that the industry does that so that it doesn't create as much of a strain on their hardware.

Which is fine for them considering that many a studio doesn't want to buy new hardware until the time permits. Probably because their existing XEON or THREADRIPPER CPUs can do all the things that most wouldn't get on their low-end to Mid-Range Intel Core or AMD RYZEN Chips.

The downside to referencing your assets is that it absolutely needs that specific location where the files are located in your hard drive..... 

or more like an SSD in many an animator's case.

Seriously, it's better to work with an SSD whether it's SATA or M.2 because the load and seek times are faster than you get with a spinning hard drive.

I actually advocated for importing the assets during my time in College but it became clear that it was starting to become taxing on my MSI Laptop's configuration for CPU, GPU, and Storage so I took the advice and started to reference all my assets.

And this still applies even after building my first PC: 

MAVERICK WARHAWK RTX 5900x

I currently now run the MAVERICK FALCON 7900RT as my main workstation

but even the switch to Socket AM5, increased amount of L3 Cache as well as my 16GB GIGABYTE EAGLE RTX 4080 GPU still tells me to reference all my assets.

So whatever the cause, If you don't want your scene to be all heavy and stuff, REFERENCE.

Just go to the FILE TAB on Maya, scroll your mouse down to REFERENCE, then locate the .MA or .MB files you want to reference.

Beware if one of the formats refuses to play ball with you.

With your files now referenced, only the basic necessities of it's data is used.

This helps with performance, especially with those who's CPUs or GPUs aren't up to date.

Such as my MSI GP62M 7RDX Leopard Laptop

With it's KABY LAKE Intel Core i7 7700HQ CPU & Nvidia GTX 1050 Chipset.

Though to be fair, I haven't been using this laptop for my workloads in animation since June 2023 because I've since used my own Custom Built Hardware which gave me a major boost in performance compared to even the highest-end laptops imaginable. 

I'll update this post when the time permits. I promise.