Here I will explain how to make shader for lava effects using Maya material editor, called hypershade. For this tutorial I recommend basic knowledge about connecting material nodes inside hypershade.

So for lava effect, we will following procedural 3d textures:

-          Stucco

-          SolidFractal

-          Granite

Also, we are going to use following utility nodes:

-          MultiplyDivide

-          SetRange

-          Bump3d

-          Displacement

-          Luminance

-          3D texture placement

First, create plane (NURBS or poly), and assign lambert shader to it.

Go to hypershade, graph the network of lambert material(lambert4 in my case, in yours will be lambert2 if you started blank scene), don’t do with the lambert1.

Create stucco node (under 3d textures tab)

Stucco and the 3d placement node shall pop near the material, and also open attribute editor for stucco (ctrl+a)

Change shaker attribute to 30, and change channel1 to black and channel2 to orange.

Connect Stucco to incandescence of the material.

Create Fractal texture (also under 3d textures)

Open color balance tab and click to change color gain attribute.

In the color wheel make the color orange. In the HSV sliders under the wheel, change V to 2.5 (so basicly the color goes higher than actual color range, use this every time when you need to create fire and explosions)

Connect Fractal to the channel2 of the stucco. You can do that easily by selecting  the stucco, and than dragging fractal to the channel2 color (black rectangle).

So now you are starting to get something that looks like lava!