See shading and lights in a scene view

Hardware texturing, a Maya feature that you can easily turn on or off, lets you to see approximations textures, lights and objects in your scene in a scene view.

What you see depends directly on the settings you make in the Render Settings window and per-object settings you change. What you see is not necessarily what appears in the final render, but it gives you a good idea.

NoteIf you are using a file texture that uses MirrorUV and the resolution of the hardware rendered texture in the scene view appears degraded, use the following environment variable:

MAYA_HW_FILE_TEXTURE_RESOLUTION_OVERRIDE

TipTo see the resolution boundaries in the scene view, turn on the Resolution Gate. For more information, see Turn scene view guidelines on or off.

To see textures, lights, and objects in a view port

In the scene view, select Shading > Smooth Shade All.
Select Shading > Hardware Texturing (or press the hotkey 6).
Do any of the following (optional):
- To use all lights in the scene, select Lighting > Use All Lights (or press the hotkey 7).
- To see a more accurate preview result (which may take a little longer), adjust the Hardware Texturing attributes in the object’s material’s Attribute Editor.
  NoteWhen you play an animation with just Hardware Texturing turned on, each of the necessary file textures are read in one at a time and the animation speed is choppy.
  Use Interactive Sequence Caching Options to load file textures into memory only once for faster interactive animation (but this uses a lot of memory).