stolen from tokeru's maya wiki, referenced from a dead highend3d thread:
I used to animate with fields, but didn't get very good results. I felt like I was "forceing" the fluids around instead of letting the sim do it for me. I know you directed this at Ducan, I can get you started by explaining the gist of the internal animation with fluids.
All the animation controls are in 2 places: Dynamic Simulation(sets the world rules), and Content Details (sets how the specific fluid will animate). It's all about temp and density...
Density is what you see. So you can give it a + bouyancy and make it go up. - makes it go down.
It you add temp (what you can't see) and give them conflicting bouyancys then when the temp disapates the density falls (or rises). If you give temp a high diffusion then the fluid will plume out, high dissapation the density bouyancy will take over because the temp dies out. High temp bouyancy and you'll get a mushroom cloud effect. Anyway there's a lot along these lines...
