Smoke Materials

Smoke materials turn an object into moving smoke. Both are translucent and animate without end: soft gray or white wisps rise from the base, drift with the wind and fade into the air at the top. They differ in how they use the object you put them on, and in the kind of smoke they draw.

Two kinds of smoke

Smoke is a full smoke column, like the plume from a chimney, a candle or a smoldering fire. It does not keep the object's shape at all: wherever the object stands, a column of smoke rises from its center, its width and height set by Radius and Height, and it always turns to face the camera as you orbit, so it reads the same from any side. Near the source it rises as a thin, smooth thread; past a set height it starts to curl and roll into billows, widens, then dissolves. It also shades itself: where more smoke lies between a point and the light, that point is drawn in the darker color, which gives the plume volume.

Smoke Ribbon keeps the object's surface and fills it with wispy smoke that scrolls upward. Its edges fade softly on all four sides, the colors blend from the bottom to the top, and the shape itself twists around its vertical axis, a little more the higher you go, so a flat panel becomes a slowly turning, spiraling ribbon. It is lighter and more graphic than the column: a stylized wisp rather than a physical plume.

How to choose

Use Smoke when you want believable smoke rising from something: a chimney on a house model, a cup of coffee, incense, a fire, a smoking crater. Place a small object where the smoke should start and adjust Height and Radius to the scene. Use Smoke Ribbon for decorative wisps: a curl of smoke behind a product, a mystical trail beside a title, a soft vertical accent in a hero section. Put it on a tall flat plane for the classic ribbon.

Settings that matter most

On Smoke:

• Transition: the height where the smooth thread turns turbulent. Low values make it billow almost from the start.
• Turbulence and Spread: how strongly it curls and how wide the billows grow.
• Dissipation: how much of the top is spent fading out.
• Wind Dir and Sway: how far the plume leans and drifts sideways.
• Color Dark, Color Light and Light Color: shadowed smoke, lit smoke and the tint of the light on it.

On Smoke Ribbon:

• Twist Strength, Twist Speed and Twist Start: how much the ribbon spirals, how fast it changes and how far up the twisting begins.
• Detail, Remap Low and Remap High: the size of the wisps and how thin and broken they are.
• Edge X and Edge Y: how wide the soft fade is on the sides and at the top and bottom.
• Color and Color Top: the bottom-to-top color blend.

Both have Speed for how fast the smoke rises and Density for how opaque it is. Turn Density down for faint haze, up for thick smoke.

The library also has ready-made smoke objects, such as the Smoke Plume and the Smoke Ring, and object effects that make anything dissolve into smoke.