In Maya, there are three basic types of fluid effects:
Dynamic fluid effects behave according to the natural laws of fluid dynamics, a branch of physics that uses mathematical equations to calculate how things flow. For dynamic fluid effects, Maya simulates fluid motion by solving the Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics equations at each time step. You can texture dynamic fluids, apply forces to them, and have them collide with and move geometry, affect soft bodies, and interact with particles.
3D fluids inherently require extra data to define them, which can make them very large. This extra data can slow a dynamic simulation exponentially because more calculations (solving) must be performed at every step of the simulation. For a less memory intensive effect, you can use a 2D fluid (with less data), or you can create a non-dynamicfluid.
Non-dynamic fluid effects do not use the fluid solvers to simulate fluid motion. For non-dynamic fluid effects, you create the look of a fluid using textures and you create fluid motion by animating (keyframing) texture attributes.
Since Maya doesn’t solve the fluid dynamics equations for non-dynamic fluids, rendering this type of fluid is much faster than rendering a dynamic fluid.
You can create Ocean and Pond fluids to simulate large realistic water surfaces, such as stormy oceans with foam and swimming pools. Oceans are NURBS planes with ocean shaders assigned to them. Ponds are 2D fluids that use a spring mesh solver and a height field. Also, you can add Wakes to Oceans and Ponds to create boat wakes, add additional turbulence, or generate bubbling and ripples.