Smoke Trail for school in need of a critique please

[Drewvian]

Hello Everyone,
I am new to the website and VFX in general. I am actually working on a project for school where I need to create a smoke trail. I have my first round of testing pretty close to done, but I need a critique on it. What I am trying to achieve and I am finding it difficult to do so, is to make the trail go on for longer but with out it dissipating to fast.

Here is the effect i am going for it starts at 3:49 where the smoke trail comes out from voldemort


Here are my renders that I have done
First render-


Second Render-This one I cut down the animation and slowed down the movements


Thank you all for the help/critiques in advance it is greatly appreciated.

[donaldStrubler]

I'm assuming you are a Full Sailor, and Brian or whoever is doing art tests these days is going to go crazy over how low rez it is. You can literally see each voxel separation. I would up the res by at least 500%.

[Drewvian]

Thanks for that suggestion, and yes I am a Full Sailor ((sounds funny)). I will go ahead and do that, and post a new vid in a few hours.

[Drewvian]

ok so it took me awhile to get this render but I have a higher res, well it is as high res as my computer would let me go. I am open to any suggestions and or tips, since I am pretty new at working in maya fluids. Again thank you in advance for the help and critiques.

[wesdood]

The voxels definitely need to be upresed. You also might want to play with the opacity graph and put in some sharp dips in the opacity.

[wesdood]

ok so it took me awhile to get this render but I have a higher res, well it is as high res as my computer would let me go. I am open to any suggestions and or tips, since I am pretty new at working in maya fluids. Again thank you in advance for the help and critiques.

http://vimeo.com/10718245

It's a step in the right direction. You can still see the voxels though, especially when it starts. I'd still go double resolution of whatever it is now at least.

Since you go to Full Sail, I'm assumming by my computer you mean your macbook. You should use the lab computers, your macbook isn't really the best way to go for VFX.

[Drewvian]

Yeah I would be but right now we are on spring break and the school is closed to the students. I have my pc that I am pushing, but I still have some limitations with it. Yeah once we are back in classes I will be doing all this at the open labs. Just for now on spring break I have to work from home.

So would you suggest that I go into the resolution for the fluid container and up that resolution or should I add more voxel density? Really we haven't gone over any of this yet in class we have been working on particles, but I have checked out Gnomon DVD's at school to get a jump on this. I do know next week we will start going over Fluids.