Performance
- Grid Resolution is the biggest lever. 80 is the sweet spot for most work; go lower for responsiveness during setup, higher for final renders.
- Particle Distance is the second lever. 200% halves particle count and roughly halves render time.
- Pressure Iterations below 30 may cause particles to "squirt" through obstacles; above 100 is usually overkill.
- For hero shots: turn on Bake Simulation after setup so scrubbing is instant and the render pass isn't waiting on the solver.
- Adobe After Effects allocates one CPU core to Maelstrom. The simulation is deterministic but single-threaded; multi-core acceleration is planned for a future version.
Style recipes
- Waterfall. Water Height 80%, Water Width 30%, Open Boundaries on, a Collider along the bottom and sides. Optionally Metaball shape for smooth water.
- Magic trail. Emitter with high Force and low Rate, Trail particle shape, 0 Gravity, Full Lifetime off with Lifetime around 1 second plus Fade Out.
- Fire-like smoke. Flip Gravity Direction to 0 degrees (up), low Particle Distance for density, Velocity-mode Color Gradient black, red, orange, yellow, Turbulence on with Curl mode.
- Falling sand / debris. Surface Tension 0, high Particle Distance, Disc shape, Damping around 2. Looks grainy and granular.
- Ink in water. Metaball shape, very high Smoothing, low Damping, an Emitter with gentle Force in the middle of the comp.
- Alpha-video emitter. Drop an alpha-channel footage into Emitter Shape, set Inherit Velocity around 100%. The plugin auto-tracks the alpha region's internal motion and makes particles inherit it.
Keyframe tips
Physics-meaningful parameters are keyframeable and carry no cache penalty: Gravity, Gravity Direction, Speed, Wind Force, Turbulence Force, all Emitter sliders including Inherit Velocity, and Color Gradient. Animate them for dynamic effects like wind gusts, gravity flips, emission bursts, or colour shifts over time.
Structural parameters (Grid Resolution, FLIP Ratio, Water size, and similar) have their keyframe stopwatch intentionally hidden: changing them triggers a full simulation restart, which wouldn't work smoothly as an animation anyway. Animate visual parameters (colour, size, fade) instead of structural ones.
Layer inputs
- Six parameters accept AE layers as inputs: Size Map, Color Map, Emitter Shape, Force Field, Collider, Kill Zone.
- Important limitation in v1.0: these layers use their native footage pixels, not what you see in your comp. Scale, Position, Rotation, opacity, or masks applied to the layer are ignored. Pre-compose the layer into a comp matching your working comp's dimensions if you need transformed versions. (Planned to be fixed in a future release.)
- Setting a layer param to "None" correctly disables that input.
Saving & reopening projects
Project files remember all parameter values. Project files do not remember the baked simulation: Maelstrom re-simulates from frame 0 when you reopen. Use Bake again once re-computed. This is intentional; the bake can be many GB of memory and would bloat project files.