Handling of large domains

I have I scene with a car that is moving, following a curve a I attached some cylinders to act as smoke emitters for the tires, all with mostly default settings.

(Edit: removed the first question, it was caused by timeline playback being synced to sound)

My second question relates to the size of the domain.
The car drives for several minutes, which means the size of the domain must be massive to cover the whole track. This also means the polygon size is massive and I can’t just set the polygon resolution to some huge number since my computer would poop itself. So what is the best way to handle this? Make the domain small, parent it to the car so it moves along with it? I read that can be quite buggy.

Thanks!

Surely the tyres aren’t smoking round the entire track? Maybe make multiple domains where you need smoke

Sadly it’s a country road and the smoke is actually kind of a dirt cloud the tires “kick up” as they move so there has to be a smoke effect going the whole time since it’s a continuous camera shot.
If there is no suitable solution I will adapt, but I first want to see if someone maybe knows something I don’t.

Hmm, maybe look into faking it with particles and 2d textures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL0G5oOjdtk

These days you might be able to do it with geometry nodes to keep the planes facing the camera

Can you try and parent all of your smoke objects to any child of the rig that has a path follow constraint (which you might have already) and then select the domain and click bake?

Oh, and make sure the adaptive domain is turned on…

Strategic thinking not how to details:

A giant domain with high resolution* will take a long time to compute if it doesn’t “poop” your computer.

I would investigate using particles to do this. There are probably plenty of tutorials about that. Particles can have a limited number present at any time by using lifespan and having contact with the ground or something terminate them. Force fields acting on the particles can provide turbulence and wind effects. You could combine particles with a huge but low res sim. Creative materials like volumes and odd shapes could be useful.

That would be my first choice.

Second would be overcoming the problems with mobile domains.

Third would be a huge high res domain. Sometimes it is best to let the computer work for 20 hours rather than research options for 20 days.

*You see the small cube in the corner of the domain box? That visualizes the resolution of a simulation.

Another possibility. Make a few volumetric clouds of various shapes and densities. Save them as VDB (vdx? whatever that volume format is). Import those and use as particles or otherwise use them to make the dust.

Yet another method.

This tutorial just cropped up: