Help! 3ds Max Simple Particle "Line" Smoke

Fuzhark

Hello!

I am working on an animation with a guy holding a cigar, and the style of this is very simplistic/cartoony, so I don't want an overly realistic smoke, but I don't want a too dull smoke either.

Trouble is, all tutorials I find is either super-realistic smoke, or just particle-planes with a smoke-map facing the camera or spheres flying up.

What I am really looking for is a way to make a smoke that looks like the smoke coming from the chimney in this YouTube video about The Long Dark. I want that "line" effect that this makes.

Is there any simple "recipe" for doing this? I have no experience with using particle effects in 3ds Max (or any other program), so I don't know if I'm in over my head or not.

Any solution, or maybe a link to an existing tutorial is very much appreciated!

Mark Dygert

The easy way I can think of is with particles, but standard particles tend to spread out more than you want, like physical smoke does. So...

Create a spline path for the smoke to follow.
Create a super-spray about the size of your smoke stream.
Create a "Path Follow" force and bind your super spray to it.
Now you're particles will stick to the line.

You can animate the verts in the spline if you want to give it a little bit of life, probably toss a noise modifier on the spline. You could also mess around with some of the other forces like drag or push so there is some minor variation in the smokes thickness.

Fuzhark

Thanks very much, it's well explained. I will try this out!