From the course: Maya 2018: Bifröst Fluids

Meeting prerequisites - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya 2018: Bifröst Fluids

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Meeting prerequisites

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- [Instructor] Let's take a look at the prerequisites for this course. First of all, it is an intermediate level course leaning toward advanced. You are assumed to have some experience with Maya. If you have some Dynamics experience, that's also extremely helpful especially if you had experience with fluid solvers or particle-based liquid simulations. As usual with fluid sims, you'll need an abundance of patience to get through the production process. Solving a liquid simulation can often take many hours and you may need to let your workstation calculate overnight several times in order to complete the tutorials to the same level of production value that you see in my examples. Those are the human requirements. Let's also talk about the requirements for the computer hardware. If you try to run liquid sims on a low powered computer, you will have many, many problems and you might not be able to do it at all. Although Bifrost is very efficient, it's still trivially easy to create conditions that will push your computer past its limits. I recommend that you get the fastest computer possible for liquid simulations. A dedicated workstation for professional special effects can cost 10,000 US Dollars or more, but you can do it on a system that costs a quarter of that. It will just take longer. At the minimum, you'll need a quad-core processor and of course faster is better. Bifrost is multi-threaded so more cores is better. Likewise, you'll need considerable memory, at least 16 gigabytes of RAM. Ideally, you should have 64 gigabytes of memory installed. I developed this course on a computer with 32 gigabytes. You'll need a great deal of available storage space. To be safe, I recommend 300 gigabytes available for the course. Bifrost consumes mass quantities of hard drive space for the cached simulation data. We'll need to pay special attention to where these heavy files are stored to prevent computer problems. If at all possible, you should have a fast secondary physical hard drive to prevent conflicts with the operating system drive. In some circumstances, it is actually best to have three separate physical drives. Finally, the software requirements. The amazing new Bifrost Procedural for Arnold is a Bifrost plugin for Arnold that allows advanced rendering of the fluid simulation data. It's included with the Maya 2018.1 update. That update also includes a new version of MtoA, the Arnold plugin for Maya. You'll need version 2.0.2 or later to complete all of the exercises in the course. Those are the prerequisites for this course.

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