CAN I CREATE SMOKE OR FOG EFFECTS ON A MOBILE DEVICE?

Liquids, fur, hair, steam, smoke, fog, fire, magical effects and so much more are all daily requirements in most 3D packages, but are almost always created with a particle system of some type.

- P.J. Jones

Desktop software such as Houdini, Blender and Cinema 4D have this type of tool built-in, and there are hundreds of plugins such as X-Particles that specialise in just one aspect of this topic.

Sadly the options on mobile devices are limited for creating and animating this type of particle simulation. However, you can create the visual effect of smoke and fog in other ways, and in this little tutorial I’ll take a look at how to do it in Nomad Sculpt. Bear in mind there’s no animation capability in Nomad Sculpt, so this is mostly useful for imagery in illustration and concept art.

The technique we’ll use is similar to hair cards that have been used in game design for decades. We can take a UVmapped polygon and add an alpha to it that will mask out anything that we don’t want to see. Using a greyscale gradient of some type means the texture gets more transparent as needed. With the correctly painted alpha maps, we can simulate layered fog or smoke, and this is effective for your scenes presuming that you don’t want to move the camera through the effect. Being a simple polygon means there’s little load on the CPU or GPU, and it won’t impact the overall performance of Nomad Sculpt either.