1. Creating a Fluid Dynamics Container
Step 1
Open Maya.
Step 2
Jump into Polygon mode and go to Create
> Polygon Primitives > Cylinder.
Step 3
Create a cylinder shape in the perspective
viewport.
Step 4
With the cylinder selected, press F11 to
jump into face selection mode. Select and delete the lower part of the
cylinder. This will act as an emitter object.
Step 5
Jump into Dynamics mode and go to Fluid
Effects > Create 3D Container to create a fluid container in the
viewport. Keep the emitter object inside the container.
Step 6
Select the emitter object followed by the container and
go to Fluid Effects > Add/ Edit Contents > Emit from Object.
Step 7
Press the play button and you'll see smoke emission
from the emitter inside the container.
2. Tweaking Fluid Properties
Step 1
This is quite a basic smoke without having any
volume and fluid essence. You need to tweak some properties and parameters.
Go to the Dynamic Simulation tab and set the values of Damp to 0.003, High Detail Solver to All Grids, and Simulation Rate Scale to 1.200.
Step 2
Go to the Container Properties tab and increase
the Base Resolution to 50.
Step 3
Go to the Lighting tab, turn on the Self
Shadow option, and increase the value of Shadow Quality to 1.
You can now see the self shadow of the smoke inside the viewport.
Step 4
To change the color of the smoke, go to the Shading
> Color tab and change the colour of the smoke by clicking on the Selected
Color option.
Step 5
Go to the Auto Resize tab and turn on the Auto
Resize option. The grid will now keep expanding according to the smoke
expansion.
Step 6
Go to the Content Details > Density tab and
set the values of Buoyancy to 10, Dissipation to 0.500, and Noise to 0.100.
Step 7
Go to the Velocity tab and set the values of Swirl
to 4 and Noise to 0.100.
Step 8
Go to the Turbulence tab and set the value of Strength
to 0.025.
Step 9
Go to the Shading tab and you can play with the Transparency
value for the desired falloff transparency of the smoke, as shown in the
following image.
Step 10
Go to the Shading Quality tab and set the value
of Quality to 1.500.
Step 11
Go to Create > Lights > Directional Light
and create a directional light in the scene, as shown in the following image.
Step 12
Keep the value of the Intensity as 1.5
and turn on the Use Ray Trace Shadow option.
Step 13
Go to the Fluid Attributes tab and Increase the Density/
Voxel/ Sec value to 5.
Step 14
Go to the Container Properties tab and increase
the Base Resolution to 250. For final production-quality
rendering, you can increase this value to 400.
Step 15
Open the Render Settings window. Set Render
Using to Mental Ray. Go to the Shadows tab and set Shadow
Method to Segments.
Step 16
Hit the Play button to render the frame. You
will see the simulation of thick smoke coming out from the emitter object.
Conclusion
In the next part of the tutorial, I'll show you how to create fire using fluid dynamics in Maya.
Envato Tuts+ tutorials are translated into other languages by our community members—you can be involved too!
Translate this post
