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.