like i know, all the new updates in blender made me download it again, i haven't made anything in blender for over a year. i can't beleive i still remember how to do everything (i need to practice nodes a bit)
but yeah, its fun.

for a sim with a reasonable balance between time, resolution and memory the resolution should be from 70-120.  the grid levels is actually another option under the "advanced" ( st, ad[this one], bk) tab in domain options.  keep gridlevels at -1 for it to do it automaticaly

its perfectly alright for the bake to start at -1, that just means its doing some precalculations.    just wait for something else to happen, your computer might not have enough memory to do the bake, but i doubt that is the issue.  more likely is that your processor is to slow and you set the grid levels too high.

don't worry, i probably won't end up using the model for anything, actually, would you mind if i use it to test my renderer?

currently this is all i have:

i should really download blender on my new computer (its been a while because i have been so concentrated on programming my renderer and interbeat)

do you have a coppy of the file that you wouldn't mind sharing?

hey.
first off, i'd like to say hell yeah, i'm making a come back.  i'm finally finished with most of my apps and my most recent java project which was not cg related.  even though i'm still swamped with work and relationships i feel its time to come back a bit.

is this a beta blender build or an official build?  did that object start out as a cub domain or something else?

btw, when learning blender, the most usefull thing i could do to help me learn was to just play with buttons not knowing what they did.  if you dont want to mess up a scene, make a new scene specificaly for playing with that button.  in my whole blender experience i think i've only ever used maybe 6 or 7 tutorials.  a topology tutorial for making a hand, a tutorial for armatures, a tutorial for uv (although i beleive that whatever can be done with textures, excluding writing, can be done with procedurals), a tutorial for caustics and yafray, the wiki article on liquids, a tutorial on particles which can be found on blendernation, and the basic interface tutorial.  from there all the other knowlege came from playing around (and the sss stuff from the papers by henrik jensen).   oh, and i dont realy like video tutorials, while they do go through everything its anoyint to have to pause and replay and go back and stuff. 

sorry it took me so long to notice this post, i've been in india for the past two weeks and havent had time to go online.  i dont realy have the ability right now to work on a tutorial what with helping write one render engine and writing my own render engine, and leaving for california in two days, but i can explain a couple of things while i'm at it.

1-UV Mapping. What the Heck is it?
    its the how you go about applying a texture to a model from an image based on the triangle coordinates of model in 2d space (put simply).   there should be a couple of tutorials on it in the blender tutorials section although not video tutorials.   more techinaly, UV stands for how a point on a triangle is defined.  UV is defined with two numbers.  suppose you have a triangle defined by 3 points (a, b, c) or two edges- ab, and ac.  the U number is the length coordinate along ab, and the V coordinate is length along ac.  the point defined is that in which the rays that are tangent to ab and ac starting at the point u away from a and v away from a intersect.   you can find a picture description of that on wiki.  hopefully you'll never need to actualy understand that and you shouldnt bother reading it like 25 times trying to.
    the easest way of thinking of uv mapping is how you get a flat map of the world onto a spherical globe.  the uv map tries to map out where an image should get applied to the model.

2-Exporting a Mesh as a Image for texture fitting
         UV mapping

3-Adding Textures and Bump-Maps that move WITH the characters/objects
          UV mapping and topology

4-Nobes...er what are they and how do I use them?
           my unfinished tutorial on skin and sss should explain it
5--Water, Wind, Hair, and Cloth simulators. I don't know how to get started let alone making them.
            i had a tutorial on water, i have not yet mastered wind hair and cloth.
6-What is a "sss?" I read about them but no clue what they are.
            somebody already did a very good job of explaining it
7-How do you make Wax or Sken Materials look like they should?   oodmb, done it before, but I can't figure it out.
            SSS.  my unfinished tutorial on skin was going to explain it, but i stopped trying to find time to finish it when blender got internal sss effects.  basicaly there is now a button under materials to turn on sss.
8-Adding rotation limitations to Armatures. How do you do it?
               i hate armatures, i'm no help there.
9-Lighting is a pain to learn, can you help?
               thats just practace and a good render engine.
10-Adding Collision detection. I'm tired of my models pasing through one another when I don't want it to. It's a big waste of time positioning them when I KNOW it can be a LOT easier.
                you'd need to do a physics simulation.  making sure your models dont pass through each other is just one of the many tedious things in 3d art.

thats something to post on the indigo forum, that way, if its a bug ono can handle it.

yah, they keep moving the q -uit button because it gets annoying to work and accidentaly hit it and bam lose all your work.  the if you have antialaising set on on your card, it makes blender appear fuzzy, but other than that, i've never experienced any other probs

if spybot isnt catching your problem, then it could be a virus or just the fact that spybot has been falling behind.  download a couple other ones.  but... i'd recomend just reinstalling windows and backing up your stuff(or attempting a switch to linux).  reinstalling has a number of advantages anyway- you get rid of junk on the drive that you cant find or delete that you dont need that takes up lots of gigs of space, you end up removing lots of the start up programs, and everything is nice and clean and works realy well.

if a 2 year old machine is slowing up with internet downloads, the problem is probably spyware, unless your on dialup.   the quality of the machine realy doesnt effect how fast it downloads stuff.  however, 2 gigs of ram and a 3200 isnt bad. i usulay work with less than 1 gig of ram (500 mb used by windows. )  and i consider my computer realy fast.  if you want your computer to run alot faster, just reinstall windows and get an external hard drive to back everything up that you absolutly need.    otherwise, download spywareblaster and spybot sd

having it be selectable would be way to much work for the coders seeing as there are algorithms that use down plane.  i think lots of the constraints would get messed up as well.  if its a good exporter that exports to a specific application and not just a specific format, it should do the rotation automaticaly.

cntrl R on your keyboard allows you to subdivide a specific edge loop so that the flow isnt change and hopefully only 1 or 2 triangles are made

yah-  i've been so busy programing recently some of the hotkeys are starting to escape me.