Hi I noticed a nice example of adding vel for the fluid solver but what about for smoke? Tried a few things including downloading some other demos to put something together, but I couldn't get it to work. I am simply looking to blow my smoke outward instead of up or down. Can I do this with vel? Or should I be using a heat direction? Either way, if anyone has any example that would be great.

Oh, I should add: In my smoke object, I can drop down a volume primitive (vector: 1 0 0) and then go into the AutoDopNetwork and add the volume primitive to the “Velocity SOP Path”, but that only pushes the smoke in the direction of the vector. I am looking to birth outward in all directions. (Kind of like what I'd expect if I were doing particles and birthing off of normals)

Any ideas?

If it's shaping and directability of your fluid you want, you can try using one of the many dops to apply forces to your fluid.

In the DOP network, hit tab and look inside the Forces sub-tab.

If you prefer to push the fluid around with metaballs, just create some metaballs and then in the Drive Simulation tab choose Magnet Force and bind the metaball object to your smoke container.

For more control you can use the Field Force DOP which takes SOP Geometry DOP in to the right input. Just feed in your points with any 3 float vector attribute (if you match attribute names) or supply the default “force” vector. This allows you to sculpt your fluid with point cloud vectors. the Field Force DOP can also take in a vector field (three volumes describing a force) or a single scalar field (one volume and the gradient is used). See the help for this DOP node.

See the attached file.

There are many other ways to direct smoke around but the Field Force is the most direct method and gives you lots of control.