A while ago I posted about how to manage viewports in Maya in order to prevent the screen from redrawing while doing a bake or Alembic export, which slows things down considerably. It turns out there’s a way easier way to handle this, thanks to a hidden (of course) MEL variable that Maya docs don’t seem to mention anywhere.
The command is:
paneLayout -e -manage false $gMainPane
The variable $gMainPane is a shortcut that just refers to Maya’s main viewport window. You can set the “managed” state of the entire pane to False, which simply disables refreshing it until you set it back to True. Just one line of code!
Here’s another, even easier method, that’s actually part of the Python cmds module:
cmds.refresh(suspend=True)
There’s a catch, though. From the docs on the refresh() command:
Suspends or resumes Maya’s handling of refresh events. Specify “on” to suspend refreshing, and “off” to resume refreshing. Note that resuming refresh does not itself cause a refresh — the next natural refresh event in Maya after “refresh -suspend off” is issued will cause the refresh to occur. Use this flag with caution: although it provides opportunities to enhance performance, much of Maya’s dependency graph evaluation in interactive mode is refresh driven, thus use of this flag may lead to slight solve differences when you have a complex dependency graph with interrelations.
So make sure you test each method with different kinds of bakes before you commit to any one solution.