.mayaSwatches

Tools Maya
1

Trying to make it so Maya 2012 won’t generate swatches. Are they required by Maya so textures will be displayed in the hypershade? Is that their official purpose? Anything else? I’m surprised there isn’t more documentation on 'em.

Thanks!

2

Swatches get used for showing texture swatches for shaders, textures and other render network nodes in the AE and Hypershade. They’re generated no matter what though I agree I sometimes wish I could tell Maya to not use any swatches and just disable them entirely.

3

Thanks for the info!

Yep, it would be great if they could be disabled, or their location could be changed through Maya.

4

You can.

The mel command is :

// disable swatches
renderThumbnailUpdate false;
// enable swatches
renderThumbnailUpdate true;

But you won’t have any thumbnail in your hypershade !

If you can work with that, you can insert the line into your userSetup.mel so by default it will be off. Can still when you need it on specific scene activate it manually !

Edit: the command also exists in python, I suggest when you can to use python instead of MEL, but that’s another topic :slight_smile: