If you have a Maya file with a lot of materials with textures, opening the Hypershade can be a huge gamble. It can take a ridiculously long time for Maya to calculate and load all of the material thumbnail images, especially if the associated textures are of a high resolution. (If you’re really unlucky, Maya will crash).

The good news is, we can force the Hypershade to ignore the thumbnails unless we tell it otherwise. Before you open the Hypershade, run this in the Script Editor:

import maya.cmds as cmds

# Turn off thumbnail updates.
cmds.renderThumbnailUpdate(False)

Then you can just right click and hold on the material you need to work with and select ‘Refresh Swatch’ without the others refreshing as well.

And of course if you want the thumbnail updates back on, run this:

# Turn on thumbnail updates.
#cmds.renderThumbnailUpdate(True)