How can I do a fluid sim in Houdini and render it using VRAY through 3DS Max?

I know next to nothing about Max, so I apologize if this is a stupid question. I looked around online for volume cache I/O for Max for about two hours and really couldn't find anything.

Fluid sim as in Pyro or flip?

For Flip you can mesh it out using Alembic or RealFlow plugin and use Max's plugins for that.

For volumetrics it gets more complicated. I believe the Phoenix shader for Vray will be or is now supporting OpenVDB and Field3D volumes. That should allow you to bring in Houdini volumes into it.

And as much as I like Vray, I'd recommend looking at Mantra. It's so well integrated and it is, in my opinion, the best renderer for volumes on the market, not counting wacky proprietary stuff!

Okay fantastic. Thanks very much :-) I'll check that out.
Yeah, i meant gas, not liquid. Sorry for the confusion.

I love mantra. It's definitely what I would choose to use, if I could :-) unfortunately, one of the stipulations of the job is 3DS Max and VRay.

If it doesn't work with vdbs, the Field3d tools are in the hdk files, and are pretty simple to compile (on Linux, OS X at least).