• Fluid Effects presets include simulation and volumetric rendering of clouds, smoke, snow, steam, fog, explosions, flames, nuclear blast effects, lava, mercury, mud, ocean swells, calm oceans, rough seas, rippling ponds, white caps, and foam.
• Enables you to simulate 2D fluid motion in near real time and render it as a thin volume, surface, or height field to create animated textures, giving a unique look to logo animations and other 2D objects.
• Spring Mesh Solver enables you to easily simulate wakes and ponds with ripples.
• Ocean Shader Model helps you create realistic oceans with displacement and shading techniques.
• Motion Fields enable you to create simulated objects moving through a fluid, such as a character walking through thick smoke or fog.
• Integrated with other parts of Maya—for example, a simulating fluid can act as a force on Maya particles or soft bodies and can be converted to polygon meshes.

Maya facilitates the representation of fluid substances such as fog, smoke, fire, oceans, and ponds, allowing users to edit attributes of the fluid such as density, velocity, temperature, fuel, color, and more. The fluid must be managed in a container, of which properties can be adjusted to create endless effects.

For dynamic simulations, users can adjust the gravity, viscosity, friction, buoyancy, dissipation, and diffusion of a fluid. Velocity settings allow for the addition of a swirl effect, which might be useful when rendering billowing smoke.  Shading can be added and opacity tweaked to create very realistic effects.

Fluid models can be planar or three-dimensional and can be combined to interact with mesh objects.  Fluid Effects can be used in conjunction with particle systems, acting upon particles to create realistic effects.  An example of this might be the use of ocean waves to animate sand suspended in water or the movement of river sediment downstream.  The program simplifies the creation of oceans and ponds and allows user to easily float objects on fluid surfaces.