Maya Fluid - Checking turbulence and fields

I have always had trouble with adjusting frequency of the Turbulence attribute on maya fluidShape or on a turbulence or volumeAxis field.

Then I find the ultimate solution. Because simulation of a 3D container can be really slow I create a 2D container with Base Resolution of 200. I disable any other simulation so it can be quite fast (usually real time). The Velocity Draw option is good to see the length of the velocity vectors but not that useful to see the scale of the turbulence texture.
We can map the color ramp like this:

And choose Speed as a Color Input. Do the same for opacity.

For the sake of the demonstration I set up a turbulence field for to fluid with these settings:

Play the animation and there it is. Almost like a Thomas Ruff picture.

In motion:

So after I adjusted the field I can apply on other fluids. Keep in mind volumeAxis field is a special to utilize built in turbulence because the size of the pattern depends on the size of the container. If you scale a turbuneceField it has no affect on the size of the pattern.

RV Player - Comparing Images

As we all know Tweaksoftware's RV is more than "just" an image sequence viewer. We can compare images with wipes. If we open an image sequence and drop another image sequence on  RV it shows up an option to add as a source to the session or as a layer.

In this case we add as a source. We can find out whats going on the background if we switch to stack mode (X hotkey). Double click on Defaul Stack enables to view the two (or more) image sequences in the same time. Of course they overlap each other so we have to activate wipes by pressing F6.

Now we can grab any part of the frame of the image to crop and see what's going on behind it. Below the Inputs tab we can change the order of the image sequences. That basically means the top sequence in the list is on the top of the screen as well. I put two different image sequence in RV to demonstrate the wipe/crop.

Pressing F7 displays the Info Stirp which is helpful to infidelity the image sequences.

RV is so sophisticated even if the sequences have different start frames it can be corrected by one click (actually it is two). In stack mode on Edit tab there is an option Align Start Frames. If it is turned on all image sequences will start on the same frame.

Customizing RV player - Sequence From File

As a world famous image viewer and sequence player Tweaksoftware's RV has to be revealed. There are several option usually have to set.

First of all Sequence From File option which can be set on Preferences / Packages is to allow RV to grab an image sequence from a directory rather than a single frame.

The default option to grab sequence is to drop the folder on RV. If the folder contains more than one image sequence RV paste them on the timeline following each other.
If we use another software to view still images (my personal preference is IrfanView) we have to run RV other way. However we don't want to do it every time from the Desktop or Start Menu. It is much easier to put RV icon on the Total Commander toolbar. In this case drag and drop works fine.

Commercial - SOuP

It is important to have paid ads for blog writers. Unfortunately this is an unpaid commercial. But it is worth it.
I have to tell since I know Maya SOuP my life has been changed :)
Around 2005 I switched from 3ds Max to Maya because I felt in 3ds Max had limited capabilities. Since I used Maya I had lot of situation when I felt the same. And of course lot of people talking about Houdini as the final solution for everything. Then I met SOuP and it was a ligth at the end of the tunnel.
So what is SOuP?
Basically this is a set of nodes / tools to extend maya capabilities. The main focus that we usually call procedural workflow.
Here is a website:
http://www.soup-dev.com/

I use SOuP for fun and I had production experiences as well. I'm going to write more about this soon. I just want to draw your attention to this:
Ideas for Maya

If you don't know about this forum you should check it (if you use maya at all). I linked the top ideas and you can see I'm not the only one who excited about SOuP.