Process

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RND

During the RND process, we looked through various animated smoke effects from anime and games. I found that the main way most people liked to do anime-type smoke was by using ico spheres or an instance of spheres and with either a straight alpha noise mask for dissipation or a fade-off. For our effect we decided that the typical spherical approach was too uniform and round so we needed a way to break up the shapes whilst still maintaining the bubbly round look of smoke.

Process

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Particles and VDBs

The setup was actually not too different from your typical pyro sim. We converted our initial pyro sim into particles turned those particles into VDBs and created the shape from there. To get the breakoff we used some shading techniques to add noise to the alpha to break up the smoke over time.