hellooooooooo i love all of your renders and posts you're so talented oml. may i ask for a tut on how you did the smoke in this post? tysm ily :D
Hey, thank you so much ahhh!!! That means so much to me!! ILY! 😘
In truth, my method for smoke is not sophisticated at all... It's actually laughable how simple/easy my process is for this, I'll admit 😅
There is a way to do it right in blender, but for this particular trick I don't use blender (mostly because I've never been able to get it to work right, user error I'm sure haha). But if that's what you're looking for, there's an (untested) tutorial here!
I personally use photoshop for my smoke, and, I admit, brushes!
This tutorial assumes you have a basic knowledge of photoshop, but if you don't or if any of this is confusing feel free to send me an ask and I'll be glad to help!
A while back I scoured the internet for free cigarette smoke brushes and amassed a small collection of them. Unfortunately none of mine are marked with a name or anything so I can't link to specific ones, but here are a few I've found for this tut:
Click with caution! I use ad blockers and these sites are fine for me but as always be careful!
Brusheezy free smoke brushes 15
Brusheezy free smoke brushes 12
Resource boy 200+ free smoke brushes
If you're using photoshop, make sure the brushes are in .abr format!
Once downloaded (& unzipped), if you double click the .abr file it should automatically install and open your photoshop if it's not open already.
I've pulled one of my renders of Ariss (pre-smoke) into photoshop, so let's make some smoke.
Step 1: Create a new Layer!
Make sure you are working on a new, empty layer! This will be important in later steps!
Step 2: Add smoke using your smoke brushes
On the new layer, select the smoke brush you want to use, and make sure your color is set to white/off white/grey.
Hover over your image and select where you want your smoke to be. I was unable to take a screenshot of this process, but I put my smoke here:
Step 3: Adjust opacity/shading
You should have a layer for your smoke now. Double click it and the layer style window should pop up.
In this step... honestly go ham. If you follow exactly what I'm doing, it won't look the same because of differences in our base image (color, brightness, saturation, etc). But I usually adjust:
Blend mode
Opacity
Color overlay
Outer glow
If your smoke isn't on a separate layer, any adjustment you make here will be on the main layer, which we don't want!
I've adjusted mine, & ended up with this:
Step 4: Move & adjust your smoke
Because your smoke is on a separate layer, now you can move and adjust it.
This is all up to your preference! I typically just move, adjust, and edit the layer style until I get something I want.
Sometimes I'll also blur the smoke, which you can do by selecting filter -> blur -> gaussian blur, just make sure you're on your smoke layer!
You'll know you did it right when you get this window showing the transparency instead of your image, & if the smoke blurs when you adjust the radius!
& that's it!
There's a way to also use the standard brush tool and "path blur", which I've used before but don't usually like the result of it.
But if you'd prefer to try that, here's a tutorial for it!
