I am using Maya 2012 to create a wall made up of bricks (polyCubes). When I playback the scene, Maya takes so long to calculate gravity, making my frame rate as low as 0.3 fps. Are there some settings that I overlooked, or is Maya dynamics inherently slow?
Also the bricks behave weird. They keep twitching and sliding on each other, as if they were soaps, even when I set friction to 1. I wonder why they can't reach an equilibrium or a stable state?
My computer: Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 2.1GHz, 3 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS, Windows xp sp3
Maya's RBD engine is ANCIENT. In fact, it should still be the EXACT SAME from version 4.0 or something similar. Up to M2011 the only way to have decent rigid body dynamics was to use nCloth with rigid settings to emulate a rigid behaviour. That way is not an optimized workflow though, and with lots of bodies it will slow down everything to death and probably crashing. So prior to 2012 the best solution was resorting to a 3rd party dynamics engine plugin, like Bullet (there's a free open source version of Disney's implementation called Dynamica that you can find online) If I'm not mistaken, with Maya 2012 they included DMM (Digital Molecular Matter), which was one of the aforementioned 3rd party plugins. I haven't tested it yet since we're still using 2011 in production (and we're using Houdini to do our FX stuff), but you should be able to load it from the plugin manager. Then just check the docs for usage instructions.
Hope it helped.