Up In Smoke

[Chris Smith]

to what effect and quality? Is it comical? It can just be a simple cut to some stock smoke. Is it realism? Does the person need to break into layers that burn and incenerate?

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Michael Szalapski]

Hey, check out the Tutorial here on the COW on how to disintegrate people using Wondertouch’s ParticleIllusion. If you used a smoky kind of particle emitter instead of dots you could get what you wanted with this. You would probably want to keyframe the saturation down to 0 in After Effects so it goes from the person’s colour to white.

Chris’ instant cut isn’t a bad idea though. You’d just need a puff of smoke; much easier. You’d still want ParticleIllusion for the puff.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Cutter Johnston]

Thanks to both of you. Stock footage will not give me the quality and control I desire. I am going to toast this guy. So, since Particlellusion was mentioned I will create this in my old stand by 3dsMax with particle systems and composite in After Effects with the lighting.

Muchas gracias!

[Ron Lindeboom]

You might wish to consider a combination of animating the smoke to get the movement you want and compositing it with some stock footage to get more realism by compositing in the real smoke’s behaviour.

Neither one is going to look quite right, right out of the box — but a combination of the two should give you the best of both worlds in a convincing image.

I have found over the years that when dealing with stock footage of things like smoke/fire, etc., I tend to often use more than one layer of the same fire or smoke set at varying opacities and blend modes — that often makes for a very realistic effect.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom