How to fake smoke in 3D ?

-Em'-

Anyone have an idea on how to fake smoke volume in 3D low poly modeling ?
I'm planing to make a model wich will blend skin/smoke/drape material and the hardest thing i see coming is smoke...

So i'll be very grateful if you can advice me or give me some links/tips on that method.

FreshDumbledore

this could help: http://stephenjameson.com/tutorials/faking-volumetric-effects/

Dan!

how low poly we talkin? is the smoke emanating from the model? or is it part of the volume of the object? are you able to use translucency or particle effects?

-Em'-

Thank you for the link, i'll read it later ^^

@Dan! : i'm thinking of a classic lowpoly thing (or middle poly) like this mesh :
http://www.tutorius.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/modeling-human-head-2.jpg

and this sort of smoke, in a realistic style :S
http://static.desktopnexus.com/thumbnails/29260-bigthumbnail.jpg
http://www.unificationfrance.com/IMG/jpg/lost_SmokeMonster.jpg

So i can't use particles, and i have troubles to imagine how the volume can be, because it don't have to be flat or empty !

Eric Chadwick

Particles are actually the best way to do smoke in low-poly. The caveats are: it can be slow to render in real-time (lots of overdraw), you may have sorting errors if the particles aren't rendered correctly (back to front!), and there will be hard intersections with other meshes (games use soft particle rendering to solve this). But if you solve those (and they are solvable!) then you can get a very nice effect.