Maya Fluids Basics Tutorial

hey what's up everyone welcome to effects maniac this is Sayed Mohammed Amiri again and in this tutorial I'm gonna be showing you guys some basics and some things in Maya and especially using fluids so be basically doing these two examples one which will be like this one and I'll be explaining a couple of things along the way in doing something like this and the other one would be this so kind of like a character you know on fire sort of an effect but I will the one thing that I will say is that the Maya fluids engine in fluids like solver is very old and they haven't updated in a very long while so I'm I'm really not a big fan of like using I don't personally use it on my projects I prefer to use like Phoenix FD or fume effects mostly but just for the understanding purposes and for people who are just getting started using my I think it's a great place to start and you know we can do some things with it so we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna look at take a look at the basics first and then we're gonna see how it goes from there okay so I am using my 20 18 right now so what I'm gonna do and I apologize for my voice I just got flu like last night and for me it gets worse you know it lasts about a week so I'm kind of like in the beginning state but you can already tell from my voice so no problem I'm just try to I'll try my best to you know explain the stuff so for this first example what I did was I did some text and I did like a simulation and then I cashed it and I you know II made it like fluids off of it so what I'm gonna do is go into Maya and create text so here and I'm just going to go into type and type in like effects maniac or whatever you want and no matter what font it is just make sure to go modify center pivot and make it like zero or just Center it to the grid and make it small hit R basically to make it smaller then hit W to move it so once we have our text here I make sure to Center it on the grid and yeah so what I'm going to do is I'm going to make them like separate objects so what I'm gonna do is select all these faces double-click on this and go into modeling mesh and separate once again or we can just like extract it yep and then same thing hey g2 basically repeat the last command so select hit G it'll extract so G and all the way till the end here and we don't need to extract the last one because already is like an object but the problem is the pivot points are like you know in this different positions so what I'm going to do is select them all and I'm going to go into modify and center pivot so what happens is now each of the pivot is on their own like center of the objects so what I'm gonna do is move them all and I want to rotate them you know according to their own axis so right now if I do it yeah it's just completely fine but if it doesn't for some reason you can just hold ctrl alt and right click and make sure this component usually normally some like object so or world if it is like ctrl ctrl shift if it is on the world ctrl shift then sometimes I don't know but sometimes it'll just look like weird it will rotate the whole thing but make sure it is on object sorry component so that you get like the individual rotation of all these objects and letters so yeah so I just want to rotate them like individually a little you know just likely just to make them look like random you know so kind of like this and yeah so now I'm just going to select them all and make them cloth so go to effects in cloth and create in plot so now we have the cloth but thing is they're just going to Eternity we want them to basically collide with this floor so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into the outliner and select the nucleus and make sure hit control a for the attributes make sure to turn on this option on the ground plane use plane so if I go back here and I play this you can see that they're colliding with the floor which is okay and it's only 120 frames which we which we'll be needing so I'm okay with the simulation so what I'm gonna do is cash this so that we can use it later for our fluids so what I'm going to do is select them all or just if you don't even select you can go to cash Olympic cash and export all to Olympic so once you click on that and you get you make sure it's a time slider basically your whole timeline and you can like click on export all and you can go into a directory and like make a new folder for this like cache or something or whatever you name it and then name it like D or anything I don't care so it'll basically export those frames you know as cache files so that like you can use it later as an object and it doesn't have to like calculate it over and over again so we'll let that finish which is actually done so what I'm going to go and create a new scene so once we're in the new scene I'm just going to go into cache Alembic cache and click on import olympic well go into the same folder or the cache and D and I'm going to import and I'll delete this these things we actually actually may have a camera too so I'm just going to like delete it yeah so it basically exported everything right so yeah this is the thing nucleus we don't need it so we got our simulation now I want we to eMED some fluids out for this so what I'm going to do is going to the fluids and 3d container and the container is basically the area which is used for the simulation so it's it's basically it's gonna be roughly the size of your you know the area that you want to simulate so anything that is outside the container is not going to be calculated or anything so this is basically your grid and if I preview this or if I select this first if I preview you can see by default we have this little emitter here which we can just select and you know it just it has to have something to emit smoke or fluids off of so it's basically there's a default emitter and we want to emit from those objects okay so what we can do is we can select all these objects and select the grid and both of them are selected so what I'm going to do right now is I'm gonna go into the fluids menu and I'm going to add edit contents and emit from object we haven't selected okay maybe we're select the emitter too so we can can just select it and delete this emitter and so all the objects in the grid shift and going to add edit contents emit from object front shape not found well just go go back here select all of them and select this fluids and edit content emit from object now it is working okay so now if I play this you can see that we got some fluids you know emitting from object but it's very very low quality and why is that because a great resolution is a base resolution is very low so if I increase this and I go back make sure not to increase it like crazily so much maybe like 60 you can see that the cells are getting better and that's what necessarily increasing the resolution of the grid right so you can you can go into display and you can go to the boundary draw and you can say fool so now you can see how the grid is looking right so this is like you know cubic grid right now so what happens is like the more you increase the resolution the more smaller it will get and essentially the more quality you'll get so go back to display and I'll make it like reduced yeah so this is basically a grid so now if I if I play this you can see that we have a lot more quality but then the simulation is also taking a lot more time so that's the thing that you need to keep in mind and in these fluid simulations the key thing is actually finding the right value that works and you know getting the highest quality possible-- and you know at the same time optimizing the simulation times so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set it to pounding or bottom by default and we can hide it too but for now we're gonna need it so you can see that some smoke is emitting off of it and I need to like decrease this a little bit for the tutorial so maybe like 70 go back here and see it is working as it should but then it's also when it hits the boundaries of the grid it just you know kind of collides with the boundaries of the grid so we can do something about that there's an option if you go down here it's called Auto resize if you turn that on it'll basically resize the simulation you know according to you know how far the smoke goes or you know each and every direction and goes which is actually a good thing sometimes you know so we'll keep that on auto resize and then the other thing is the most important thing here comes in the content details so right now the smoke is pretty white we can go into the lighting and turn on like self shadow so it'll have like shadow to it and we can add a color to the light or anything you know we can do those things later also but for now just wanted to mention that and now you can see some smoke is emitting off of those letters but it's there are some things the dynamics that we can so what I'm going to do is I am going to go into the content details which is here and first off we have the density which is basically you know controlling the basically the smoke and how dense it is and you know so we can change that if you want like a thin very soft you know kind of smoke so we can we can decrease it and we can increase it to get much more thicker result and the buoyancy is the most important thing here right now you see the smoke is rising up like really fast so if I decrease this it's basically controlling how fast the smoke goes if I make it like close to zero you can see that the smoke is barely rising and if you want it to come down then you can you can change it to a negative value or and right now you'll see that the smoke will fall down you know so which which is actually what we want in this example so yeah you can you can basically see I was looking and even in this example we've kind of did like the same thing so smoke is like literally falling down with a lot of turbulence and stuff and we get some quality here so we're gonna we're gonna explain that and maybe we'll make it like negative one and there's an option called dissipation which is basically how soon this smoke disappears so if I just like increase it to one you will see that the smoke will disappear like very fast see which sometimes it's good we don't if you don't want this one to last very long but like as we see in this example it does it does kind of disappear so maybe you'll make it make it like not the buoyancy the dissipation to like point four and there are some other options like you can add some noise to this make it a lot more noisier which you can probably see right now because we got like less quality so what I'm gonna do is increase the quality like a hundred percent I'm not percent just 100 the value and yeah we got that basic sort of scene that example if you want to hide the grill you can hide it and if you want to do some other things so there's another option called the velocity which you can add some swirl you know some sort of a sort of movement to the smoke which will make it look better and you can also add like noise to that swirl which will make it like look random so noise is basically like you know getting rid of all the rat like the repetitions in the in the you know texture of the smoke and making it a lot more random in different areas so it's actually like needed definitely because in nature like nothing is perfect so yeah I mean natural phenomenons like nothing's are perfect so if you go into the turbulence turbulence is basically like the wind so it will basically swirl around just like in this example so it's like swirling around all over the place so yeah you can see that and if I if I increased it right so if I go back and make sure every time you kind of like do a change to a value go back to the first frame so that updates and then played so now we can see that smoke is definitely more swirly and moving around right and if you want to increase you can go back to the density and like you know increase the density of the smoke or you can go down into the shading and there's a transparency option so you can definitely like make it more thick or thin but you know in this case you want it to be like this much is enough and we definitely want to and there are some other options the speed and frequency we definitely want add some noise some more so now we can see that the smoke is like these characters are falling off but the quality is less right so that's why we don't see a lot of detail but still you can see the movement and you know you can tweak these values and I hope you guys I mean get the the things that I'm saying the values and stuff you can also go into the Autodesk website and get a very good and detailed information about all these you know and what hmph each and every one of them do but I think these are the most important ones that like for this example that I've mentioned and there's one more thing that we have actually not done in this example but I have done in this one is like fire so fire is basically if you go into the contents method there is a temperature which is off if you set it to dynamic grid then fire will also be emitted from this which actually looks pretty cool in this example I would say so I'm gonna leave it that way but then fire also has its own options in the content detail so if I go into temperature and yeah we have like the scale like you know so we can you can you can you can see that it's definitely making it more like you know smaller sort of fire and then you have things like buoyancy point see we do want it to come down so you can you can set it to like a negative value so now the fire also will kind of you know fall down just like that you can see it actually looks pretty cool with this combination but the smoke needs to be a bit like you know darts are you going to the shading and click on the color and make sure that it's a little bit darker of a color so we can see the thing properly the fire and then we can increase the light or decrease or to whatever to make it make it look you know better but we definitely need a lot more quality you can see that we don't have enough so yeah you can play around with the settings and get the result we can also add some noise to the temperature so that the fire is kind of like you know random and kind of noisy and yeah that's basically you know the basic things that you need to do to be able to kind of you know to find your own sort of example so it it kind of like it it's different on different examples that you want to do you know you're creating an explosion you need different you know settings if you like doing a fire or or whatever you know it's different on different like effects but yeah once you get the idea you can tweak them as you need them and I want to increase the resolution to 200 and I won't do a same and let's see how it looks so the way to do that is of course you don't want them I don't want you guys to sit here and wait so what I'm gonna do is going to display and go into the boundary draw set it to none so that we don't see the great even and I'm gonna zoom out and I'm going to go back to the first frame and I'm going to do a play blast so click on play blast make sure it's a 1280 by 720 s fill is 100% employ glass and I'll wait for it to finish and once it's done I'm going to be back so the cache is done and if I play this you can see that it looks it looks cool I mean we have some quality smoke and fire but you can definitely do a lot more better so it was kind of like a basic very you know very basic and very short tutorial on like Maya fluids and I hope you guys learn something from it and you know based on the things that I've told you you can you can surely do do and do this example so this example you can see that that character is falling down and have smoke and fire emitting off of it which is basically the same thing and the character is animated and I got it off of me ox mode so if you go there and it's a can login for free and you can choose a character in the characters and then you can you can choose an animation like dancing and it'll do and you can download the FBX and use it in Maya any software you want so that's basically it but as I said in the beginning of this tutorial I do prefer using plugins especially Phoenix ft or something like fumefx for this kind of things because they give you a lot more you know you know high quality simulations and a lot better settings than this but you know this is something built into Maya and you know you can you can play around get some good results too so so this is basically it for today's tutorial and I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial and most importantly learn something from it so some of you are asking about some basics of like Maya dynamics and stuff and I hope it kind of got to start it with fluids inside of Maya and and I do want to thank you again for supporting my channel I just reached like 1k subscribers which I'm really really grateful and excited for and I try to be you know I try to make tutorials as much as possible but you know I know that I'm not consistent but as I always say I try to be and yeah that's that's what matters so I think you again for subscribing to my channel and you know keep liking the videos keep commenting any questions any ideas you might be having for the upcoming tutorials I'll try to do it and as always till next time enjoy working

Channel: FX Maniac

Views: 39,012

Rating: 4.9923882 out of 5

Keywords: Autodesk Maya Tutorial, Autodesk Maya, Maya, Fluids, Dynamics, Explosions in maya, Smoke Simulations, Smoke Simulation in Maya, Explosion in Maya, Maya Basics, Autodesk Maya Basic Tutorial, Phoenix FD for maya, Dry Ice effect, VFX, Visual effects, Dynamic Simulations in Maya, Maya Fluids, Maya Dynamics, Maya tutorial

Id: 0FD8EoWV3qk

Length: 20min 40sec (1240 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2020