Cached Playback

Cached Playback has been updated to include support for dynamics nodes and Time Editor.

Cached Playback lets you see changes made to your animation without the need to create a playblast. It appears as a blue stripe running along the bottom of the Time Slider.

Previously, each time you modified a scene, Maya would need to update and redraw. To see your edits, you often had to Playblast. Depending on the size of the scene and changes made, these updates were time-consuming. Now, your scene is automatically cached as you work and Maya only recomputes the part of the animation that's changed, rather than redrawing the whole scene.

Note: Cached Playback is active by default in Maya. The following instructions are for manually activating or disabling Cached Playback.
Whenever you edit a scene that has been cached, a part of the Time Slider turns gray to show the segment of the animation that is out of date before becoming blue again to show that the values have been updated. See the Cached Playback status line states topic.
Caching Modes
Because Cached Playback stores your animation in memory, you can further optimize playback by choosing the best caching mode for your setup, as each method has attributes that give better performance depending on your current hardware setup.
Experiment with different modes to see what provides the best performance gain. You can change Cached Playback modes by right-clicking either the Cached Playback icon or the Time Slider. See Choose a mode for Cached Playback for more about the different modes.