How many referenced files can Maya handle?

Is there a limit of maximum reference files allowed? I am thinking about referencing into the render scene a huge amount of materials stored in individual files.

Hey there! I haven’t run into a hard limit - I’ve done a few thousand. Was working on a personal project trying to render out a nice image of something build in LEGO digital designer. Each brick I was its own .mb file on disk, so when the scene was assembled, the whole thing was referenced.

One thing I will say is that Maya didn’t (doesn’t?) really have any load caching - so opening the file took a REALLY long time as it read in each referenced piece over and over again (even though the same 4x4 brick was referenced in hundreds of times). Once in Maya, everything seemed to be OK. Renders were alright as well.

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Yeah, you are more likely to be encountering horrific load times because while you can reference a lot of files, Maya isn’t always fond of the idea.

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If you use Arnold for rendering you could look into the new Operators.
https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFMUG/Look+Dev+Using+Operators

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Also a perfect use case for USD and material X when the support matures.

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Will I get performance gain from USD, like if I would use VRay Proxy (at the stage of loading into Maya scene only) instead of geometry?

I don’t know how v-ray’s proxies work, but once a native USD object is loaded it is always ready to access, even you change Maya scenes.

Just keep in mind that your milage with the format may vary. Support in Maya is in the early stages.

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If the viewport is in Hydra mode, yes its faster and a heavy scene will load in seconds not minutes.

Take a look here at 14min.
https://vimeo.com/365638295