Fluids - A ship's wake

[ensilzah]

I'm going over the gnomon tutorials for Maya fluids and I'm trying to figure out how to make a cloud wake for my flying ship.
I've created a fluid with an emitter at the front of the ship and parented the fluid container to the ship so it moves with it.
That however doesn't look quite right, since the wake seems pinned to the ship's location.

Is there a better way to confine the wake to a small area around the ship so it doesn't take too long to resolve while making the fluid behave as if its position is relative to the world rather than the ship's position?

[daikath]

Did you use the ocean example from Maya? It has a create wake option. Dynamics -> Fluid Effects -> Create Ocean     and in the same menu Create Wake.

[dsehgal]

I've created a fluid with an emitter at the front of the ship and parented the fluid container to the ship so it moves with it.
That however doesn't look quite right, since the wake seems pinned to the ship's location.

You can use a small trick here, just remove the front translation keys of the ship, by front translation I mean is the direction in which the ship is moving, it can be X axis, Y axis or Z axis (as you said that it is flying so I am assuming that you must have animated the translation and rotation values), so that you now have the rotation and up and down movement of the ship.. But pls save the original version of animation.

Now try the same method as you did by creating an emitter at the front of the ship (but this time i'll suggest you to use the curve based emitter) and simulate the fluid for the required frames.. (Or you can also make cache...)

What you have now is the simulated fluid layer which is behaving well with your ship's rotation, ups and downs and also respecting its surface.. Now bring in the ship with the original animation and parent this fluid container with the ship.

You can render this layer and comp it in rest of the clouds in a compositing software...

If you are still not satisfied with the results then you can use a particle based fluid 'AfterBurn', its easily available on creative crash.