Bryan Woodard has created a useful script that takes particles emitted in Maya and replaces the particle positions with bubbles. This comes in handy if you want to create bubbly liquids in a chemistry lab in Maya. The Particles to Bubble script will make your bubble simulations more realistic and easier to render, as the bubbles are converted to geometry from particles which opens up more rendering options.
The Python script works by querying the positions of emitted particles in Maya, and replacing them with geometry based on a dynamic nCloth solution. This allows bubbles to interact with each other in the scene, as well as bounce of other surfaces such as the beaker glass. As the bubbles have dynamic geometry, you can use other shaders than what is normally available to render nParticles in Maya.
Get the ParticleToBubble script on GitHub.
For the backstory of how the script was created and a more detailed description, check out the ParticleToBubble post on Bryan’s blog.
