Creating smoke using sprites

Maya has a neat way of creating smoke. This method uses the Hardware renderer making rendering almost instant. For this test I got an image from google, coloured it in blue and made it bright (just for the test). The sprite is then assigned to a smoke emitter set to emit smoke sprites, Maya 2009 has a predefined smoke particle that fades the opacity over time already. So after adding the smoke, you can press play and see the smoke rise.