Maya 2025 Node Editor expands too many nodes when graphing connections

[dora88]

Hi everyone,
I have a question regarding the Node Editor in Maya 2025.3 (this isn’t directly mGear-related, but I hope it’s okay to ask here).

When I select a control like neck_C0_head_ctl from the Game Biped Template (Y-up) rig and use the Node Editor to display input and output connections, too many nodes get expanded. This leads to the following warning:

// Warning: Node Editor graphing connection limit (500) reached. Partial graph will be displayed. You can modify optionVar 'editorConnectionScanLimit' to increase limit.

In Maya 2022.4, the same operation results in a much more manageable number of nodes being displayed, without any warning. I’m trying to make Maya 2025 behave the same way.

I’ve already tried adjusting the traversalDepthLimit option in the Node Editor, but even setting it to 2 still results in too many nodes being shown. Setting it to -1 crashes Maya due to the large number of nodes.

Does anyone know which Node Editor settings might be causing this change in behavior in Maya 2025? Or is there a way to limit the number of expanded nodes like it worked in Maya 2022?

Additional note: I’ve noticed that Maya 2023 and 2024 also behave similarly to Maya 2025, with a large number of nodes being displayed in the Node Editor.

Since this is translated from Japanese, I apologize if the message is difficult to read.
I’d appreciate it if anyone could share a workaround or a solution to this issue.

[chrislesage]

I haven’t installed Maya 2025 yet. But I almost always set my traversal depth to 1.

But it is strange how different the result is from Maya2022 to 2025. I wonder if it’s a Maya settings issue, or is it possible that you started using Proxy Attributes? I wonder if that would cause more controllers to be interconnected, and cause a deeper graph.

[dora88]

Thank you very much for your valuable insight!

I almost always set my traversal depth to 1.

That makes sense! I think I’ll also stick with a traversal depth of 1 when working in Maya 2025.

It seems that Maya 2023 and 2024 also display a large number of nodes, just like Maya 2025.
So I’d like to look into this issue a bit more.
Really appreciate your help!

[hongd]

Hello,
I believe the node editor is displaying controller tag nodes, which we can hide with the Auxillary Nodes editor. You can access it through the Node Editor’s menu “Show” > “Auxillary Nodes…”
There are still a lot of connections, but it should reduce the amount shown a bit.
Thanks,
Paul

[dora88]

Thank you for sharing your insight!

You can access it through the Node Editor’s menu “Show” > “Auxiliary Nodes…”

I had never used this feature before, so your advice was really helpful.
I’ll try to make the Node Editor easier to work with using this setting.
Thanks again for the helpful advice!

[dora88]

Hello,
In addition to the helpful solutions already shared regarding the Node Editor displaying too many nodes, I’d like to share a workaround that worked for me.

By temporarily disconnecting the connections going into rig.ctl_x_ray and the .message attributes on various nodes, I was able to reduce the number of nodes displayed when expanding in the Node Editor.

This is only a temporary solution for when I need to view the Node Editor. After I’m done, I rebuild the rig and restore the disconnected connections.
It’s probably not the best method, but for now, it gave me the result I was looking for.
I hope to share it if I come across a better solution.

Below is the code I used to disconnect the connections.
*
It has worked fine for me so far, but I apologize if there are any issues with the code.
Disconnecting .message attributes may affect some setups depending on your rig, so please use it with caution just in case.

import maya.cmds as cmds

def disconnect_destinationAttr(attribute):
    # Get destination plugs
    destinationPlugs = cmds.listConnections(attribute, plugs=True, destination=True, source=False)

    # Disconnect if there is a connection.
    if destinationPlugs:
        for dstPlug in destinationPlugs:
            srcPlugs = cmds.listConnections(dstPlug, plugs=True, destination=False, source=True)
            if srcPlugs:
                cmds.disconnectAttr(srcPlugs[0], dstPlug)


if cmds.objExists("rig"):
    # Disconnect rig.ctl_x_ray
    disconnect_destinationAttr('rig.ctl_x_ray')
    
    # Disconnect .message from all transform nodes under "rig"
    for node in cmds.ls("rig", dag=True):
        if cmds.nodeType(node) == 'transform':
            disconnect_destinationAttr(f'{node}.message')