Baking animation Maya can take a long time. This can be sped up considerably if the viewport isn’t updated constantly.

paneLayout -e -manage false $gMainPane;

disables the viewport until it is re-enabled using

paneLayout -e -manage true$gMainPane;

But if the bake raises an exception the line to re-enable the viewport is never executed and Maya is stuck with a disabled viewport.
So I’ve wrapped this into a context manager to make sure the viewport is re-enabled before the exception is raised.

from maya import cmds, mel

class ViewportDisabled(object):
    '''
    Disables viewport updates to speed up processes like baking etc.
    Example:
    with ViewportDisabled():
        cmds.bakeResults(simulation=True, t=(1001, 1020))
    '''
    def __enter__(self):
        if not cmds.about(batch=True):
            mel.eval('paneLayout -e -manage false $gMainPane')

    def __exit__(self, exception_type=None, exception=None, tb=None):
        if not cmds.about(batch=True):
            mel.eval('paneLayout -e -manage true $gMainPane')
        if exception:
            raise # we don't want to silence exceptions

Example:

from maya import cmds

with ViewportDisabled():
    cmds.bakeResults(simulation=True, t=(1001, 1500))

This reduced baking 500 frames of animation from 200 seconds to 2 seconds for me. Of course your results will vary with the complexity of your rigs.

If you have any questions or comments please do get in touch on Twitter

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