What is geometry caching?

User Guide > Animation > Animation > Geometry Caching > Geometry caching overview >

You can save your Polygon mesh, NURBS (including curves) surface, and Subdivision Surface deformations (skin and non-skin) to a server or local hard drive by caching your object’s deformations to a geometry cache. Geometry caches are special Maya files that store vertex transformation data. They are useful when you want to reduce the number of calculations Maya performs when playing back or rendering scenes that contain many deforming objects, and they allow you to easily mix and edit your object’s deformations in an intuitive, nonlinear manner.

With geometry caches, you can also exchange point data through the Autodesk^® FBX^® plug-in with other supported software packages (for example, new versions of Autodesk^® 3ds Max^® and Autodesk^® MotionBuilder^®).

NoteGeometry caches only store the XYZ positions of an object’s vertices, not the translation, rotation, or scale of the object’s Transform node.

You can use geometry caches to do the following:

Cache Blend Shapes so that you can further modify their deformations by replacing or deleting geometry cache frames.
Cache a character’s high resolution skin with many deformations to speed up the playback or rendering of its scene.

You can create geometry caches for your objects from the Geometry Caching menu, and edit them from the Attribute Editor or the Trax Editor.

NoteThe geometry cache file format is an open format that can be read with standalone applications. For more information, see the example Python script cacheFileExample.py located in the devkit\pythonScripts folder of the Maya 2009 install directory. This example script demonstrates how to parse the cache description file and its associated data. See also geometryCacheConverter.