Working with non-polygonal assets such as smoke, fire, water, fog is very intimidating. This tutorial is not about their creation and animation but about the lighting, shading and compositing of the methods available with Maya and V-Ray: fog effects with the V_ray_environment_fog, dust with Maya’s nParticles, smoke and fire effects with Maya’s fluids, water and liquids with Maya’s bifrost, Houdini’s effects exported to Maya with the openVDB format. The main highlights are motion blur, depth of field simulations and the proper rendering and compositing of their render elements in Nuke.