Maya: loading references and speed 💨

[antirotor]

Problem

When loading maya reference (via Loader) into Maya, Lot of connections are made between each and every object in reference and container set. Referencing - speedwise - is ok, but loading scenes with those references pointing to some heavy data (like rigs with many many controls/bones/null/....) can lead to many minutes overheaad compared to "vanilla maya". This is because Maya will save to scene file instruction to initialize those attribute connections, array of them, etc. This can add almost 100% (or possibly more) to the scene size and multiple loading times.

Solution

When loadin reference, connect only reference node itself to the set.

Additional musings

That should be part of our brightly sparkling new initiative - Make Artist Faster Again! (or MAFA). When testing framework is done, we should utilize it to profile are core processes to optimize them.