funny enough I’m going to take out the explosion, I like it w/o. Since we have more time. I actually would have said no to extending the deadline, since I’m in trailer crunch now, however it DOES happen all the time in production so why not here 
I found this engine and stuck it in the car
http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/289688
I then selected all the pieces, deselected any pice that looked too big or so, and the instanced them all. I have like 199 instances of which I gave rand rotation (no += yet since I wanted ti figure out how maya’s new collision attrs work) and more importantly I added rand scale. My mistake that I’m going to fix is that the particles should have more initial velocity, the first hit should have more particles flying away from the car. I think that will greatly add to the first impact.
I’m thinking I’ll take out the explosion to more show off the crash. the explosion is too big and kind of detracts from the whole crash, I felt before I added it, that it was a painful crash. then after the explosion you disassociate from it because it’s fake. Who knows maybe I’ll keep a changed version of that, if you can tell my antialiasing was too low on it and the hold out for the tree is all jacked.
powerdan, I did know that the camera did that, I even painted those frames so you don’t see underground. I will fix that now, good eye btw since that was only 4 frames, really only one, that you could see.
I’d like to turn the headlights on. give a little fog, and when the crash happens keep one or two lights still one, shooting off in odd directions. I want to add falling snow, a better background, some wind blown ground snow. I also need to better comp this. The white on white is too much it needs color. I may change the car to something more bright. Oh and the ground snow needs tracks and the snow from the tires os waaaay too wispy it needs to be clumpy, the tires are 1/4 of the way under snow and it looks like it’s driving on a road with some lightly fallen snow on it.
So the sprites on the snow, yes there is a trick to them
I take the puff ball fluid example, soften it, take out the keys, add an expression to time, and you have fluid textured particles at 1000% time increase. You can’t add rotation so the lighting remains the same, but you can push that effect, more than I did in this even. I didn’t cycle through the images, b/c I knew there would be popping and I didn’t want to spend the time to make the texture loop-able. So it was that on top of regular multi points, both with motion blur. Oh and they change color, start out red, and as they age become green. Then in comp I blur the green channel so they dissipate.
I guy at work said he might make me a tree texture, so the trees don’t have to be white like that. So we’ll see.
More spit, more polish, more to come. Thanks for all your great feedback!