smoke and explosions
 

I am trying to create an explosion that comes from within a building. lots of smoke and bit of fire.
I have got as far as playing around with the different attributes and seeing the effects. i would like to animate the smoke so it is fast then slow. i tried to set key the various points but it did not work. am i doing something wrong?
thanks

:)

does noone know how to animate smoke?

Woa! Easy tiger - It's Sunday/Saturday all over the world at the moment. An hour's not a hell of a long time to expect a repsonse on a weekday, let alone at the moment..

Which version of maya have you got? I forget which one you need, but go to Window->GeneralEditors->Visor. Select the tab called FluidExamples. Then select the folder called Smoke.
There's 4 examples there in 7.0 complete. The one you'll proably be most interested in is Puffball.ma or Swirl.ma.

If you don't have these example, or they're not much use to you. Look into creating smoke using particles, also take a look at fields and setting initial states of particles + perhaps particle cacheing wouldn't hurt either.

Realism with smoke can be a real ball-buster at times. Good luck with it..

its only been an hour, give it about a day or so and hopefully youll get alot of response ...

Download overburn, its free and superb for fire, smoke, explosions etc etc, just google it