Maya Fluids Training Part II

 Oil Fire

Working With Textures

Picking up from where I left off in the tutorials; in this tutorial I learned some more about working with texture incandescence. Not only am I changing the texture time over time but I am also scrolling the texture in the direction of the smoke to give a little bit more life. As a side note, it bugs me that I didn't realize the smoke was hitting the fluid container until I was done rendering eight hours later.

Wispy Smoke

Emissions

The emitter for this fluid is a plane under neath the grate. I used a perlin noise texture and animated the texture time to move using an expression. The texture was then used to change how much the plane was emitting depending on it's grey scale values. The emitter's density emission value as a whole was also animated to create puffs of smoke over time. One of the challenges that I came across was having the emitter emit near the center of the plane only. I couldn't figure out why for a while until I changed the number of vertices's the plane has.

Maya Fluids Training Part I

Flamethrower

More Maya Fluids

I decided to focus some more on Maya Fluids for VFX texture generation so I picked up a tutorial from Gnomon Workshop by Wayne Hollingsworth. These tutorials can sometimes be hit or miss but this one is fantastic.

What I learned

I've used textures in fluids and just kinda went "yeah that looks right." However, this time I animated the texture so that it doesn't sit still throughout the ordeal but changes over time breaking up one of the typical VFX killers, noticeable repetition.

Another neat trick I learned is how to break up the Maya Fluids initial emission mushroom by simply animating the emitter's turbulence to be very high at the start and tone it down after a few frames.