I finally decided on what to do with this car. I’ve made the side badge into my name, used Craft Director Studio to animate the car doing a wheelspin, and then used Maya fluids to do the smoke. I originally tried using particles and planned to use Krakatoa as the renderer but I just couldn’t get the right motion I was after. So this shot is going to be the opening to my new reel. I haven’t made one in about two years now and it’s high time that I did.

This took about two days of fiddling to get right. Most of the time I would run out RAM and the computer would freak out and crash. Also if you were to cache from the wrong place with the wrong method then you’ll break the cache file as well. I didn’t want to compromise on the fluid resolution (It was only at 100) so I had to use the auto resize feature and I messed that up as well. I thought I knew this stuff!

Auto resizing doesn’t work if you’ve got your threshold at 0. Surprise dumass! So I eventually settled on a threshold value of 0.1 and a margin of about 4 voxels. Finally the thing would resize appropriately and I would NOT end up with a 1.5GB cache file per frame. I’ve got 16 gigs of RAM on this machine and it got filled up so quickly.

Right now I’ve got the render going on the farm and it seems to be coming out quite nicely. Let’s wait and see.