TurbulenceFD (TFD) preferences

Before we get started, let's get a couple of things in place that'll make life easier throughout this course. If we come up to the Edit menu, down to Preferences. Down at the bottom here we'll see TurbulenceFD. Just click that and the first thing we want to change is the Default Cache Base Path. This is where all the files get written out when we simulate our fire and smoke effects. I'd just like to put these in a folder that's a little bit easier to access than the one that's selected by default that one will work absolutely fine but I usually put this on a different disk.

Usually, it's a disk that's faster like an SSD drive or something like that. So, let's just do that. Just gonna click this icon here and twirl down Computer. I'm just gonna select my F drive which happens to be an SSD drive. I've made a folder called Cache so I'm just gonna select that and choose OK that way everything's nice and organized. The next two settings are fine as default. We don't need to touch them. You may wanna change the option at the bottom though called Ask before overriding simulation cache.

It just depends on what your needs are. Basically, what this means is if we simulate an effect and we're not happy with it say, we just wanna go in an re-simulate it. We're gonna be prompted to override that cache that's been previously created. If you wanna work really fast and do a lot of iterations without any interruptions, you'd wanna have that off. If not and you just wanna play it safe, leave it on. I think we'll just leave it on for now. There's other ways to lock the cache anyway and we'll look at those a little bit further on down the road.

So with all those settings in place, let's just have a look at how we can make a custom layout whilst working in TurbulenceFD. This is just something I always like to setup. If we come to the Plugins menu here and see TurbulenceFD, we wanna grab this one here called Simulation Window. So it gives us this little pop up window with some controls. Now we wanna have access to this at all times. So to do that we're gonna grab this little grid of dots here, hold down our left mouse button and drag it over underneath the Objects panel here.

Let go. Now that's docked in there and we can get to these settings whenever we need. After that, we can come up to Window, Customization and choose Save Layout As, just call it whatever you want. Lynda TFD or something like that, something that you can remember easily and just save it. Then all you have to do is come to your Layout dropdown and select that whenever you wanna work in TurbulenceFD. So, in the next movie, we're gonna have a look at how to create a container.