i want to have cigarette smoke in my scene, not a huge part of it but still very much seen. I just want to know if people think i should try and fake it with alpha planes or it i should try and use a real smoke. and if there is a recommended tutorial also if it is to make a real smoke?
Planes should work great. Cig smoke looked stunningly realistic in the game Dishonored, and that was surely alpha planes.
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ok that would be great. ok will try that first, also found a couple smoke simulation tutorials, but i am a little intimidated by how expensive that will make the scene, but am willing to try it if the effect will be worth it.
but yeah maybe will try planes first
why planes? and what do you mean by that, trying to acheive it with procedural noise? or mapping true smoke sim images?
I would suggest just use fire and smoke and you get the best look and realism, you should consider taking a look at how smoke has more thickness at the edges of smoke, with some contrast node, and some rgb curve and setting some attributes, you could get there, I am in a middle of a project with fire now so I can not showcase any images yet.
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ok thanks. I just mean adding the pictures of smoke sort of how they do low poly trees where there are several in different directions to make it seem like there is depth.
I guess also I am not that experienced with smoke, maybe it won’t be that hard to do. Thanks for the suggestion.
I recommend using Blender smoke simulation by setting temperatures, density, material, wind etc.
And use reference. Without reference it probably look fake.
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Ok thanks everyone! I need to try to remember to do this already, thanks everyone for your help, will try and remember and will also try to post results here
I would also not use any noise method strength in the hig resolution smoke settings, so no wavelet or FFT noise strenght, instead use a couple of winds, it will b tricky at first…but when you get there you will be glad to know how.
But any smoke curling should start to appear a bit later after intial smoke rise, so you would have to position wind or turbulence or vortex forces a bit above the actual cigarette, and you may need to use fallof strenghts.
As for the smoke density, I think you would need to add some contrast node, combined with attribute set to flame or density, and also curves to get the sharper edges in the smoke, just like in these flame settings, you do not have to make it that complex as I did with the nodes and shaders though.
Tricky part is to set the curves right.
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Thanks, that sounds good, this was really helpful to give me an idea what to do, setting up several winds was a little weird but in the end I feel much easier then trying to get a specific force to make a cigarette smoke.
Here is my progress so far,
update: ok now the smoke is looking like this:
prob will start on texturing it soon
I think you could use a bit more turbulence …giving it more of a larger swirl, and remember to render it out
and crush density levels, if you wold want the kind of cig smoke edges, density is kind of more pronounced at the outside edges of the smoke…
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Looks amazing, do you think you could take a screenshot showing the Wind and Turbulence settings?
Did you use Sphere Falloff?
Sorry for this, just have had very little time this summer for 3D work.
Maybe later at winter or early next year.
No worries, I was just asking in case you had the file.
Thank you.