Maya Fluids.

So this post I dedicate to trying to wrap my head around fluids O_o 

I started reading about it all etc. 

So I will be posting bits and pieces I find useful, a few screenshots here and there. 

Create Fluid container with emitter. Mmmkay that's a good start :')  

 Fair enough but now it was time to start playing around with all the options cause I'm such a noob I didn't really know what I'm doing. 

So here for example:

Everything was fine... eeeeverything was fine and at one point it just stopped raising and I was like: whaaaaa O_o

Turned out it was just the 'Damp' was too high and turns out it cause it to float in one place. When I took it down to 0 it was fine : D 

Here I was just trying to tame it a bit, cause so far it seemed to be doing whatever it wanted to O_o

I came to a conclusion that it's best to have it emit from an object. I used a cylinder as a base, fiddled with it for a bit to shape it up a little nicer, a little more like a tornado and went from there. 

After I played around for a bit I realized that it was a right thing to do, and I regretted not doing this earlier because it really helped the overall look. 

Here I got the turbulence up and it looked really angry, and fluffy. I like it ^^

High buoyancy.

The rest of the time I literally, just went through all the possible options till  I got a brief idea on where I stand with this. 

When it started looking like I wanted it to it was a time to make it spin.

For this I used airfields etc. I've got a vortex field in there also.

The common problem I had with the fluids is taking control over them, to do that I used volume axis fields. It seemed to work best at keeping it in place/shape. So once it was spinning and had the volume axis field affecting it there wasn't much else I had to do with it. 

Another thing I spent a while thinking about was to whether I should have the auto resize on or not. There are huge advantages of having it on, like you don't have the fluid overfilling the space, or touching the edges and looking square. But the disadvantage is that it will go up and up and up forever, and you can't control it as much. So my solution was to keep the boundaries so I have control over it, and play around with the opacity of it so as it gets close to the edges it disappears rather than ruin the effect. 

When you think of a moving tornado, it obviously isn't perfectly at a 90 degree angle, it sort of leans. 

Someone suggested for me to just key it moving across the screen and render it out like that. But because I am emitting from an object in a shape of a tornado already, it wouldn't work. 

But the fluids are a bit random anyways so I don't fear it'll look really fake and awful. : ) 

The other thing I wanted to comment on is how difficult it is working with fluids simply because you have to playblast everything cause even a tiny change can make such a difference, and with the high quality of it it takes ages to render and you can't render like, 30 frames because you have to let it develop... 

You've gotta be patient! D:

I am planning on doing a tutorial on it so I will let you know how exactly to make it look like this c: