I was able to render a scene by using Maya's native 3d container to create emitters attached to objects (with the legacy renderer engine 1.0 instead 2.0). However the orientation of the generated smoke from the emitters is off. Please let me know how to fix this issue. Refer to the picture attached.
Thanks for the report. This is actually a known issue. We are planning to add support for Volumes in the new engine. Hopefully this issue will be fixed there.