Cigarette Smoke

Russell Pointer has asked me to add cigarette smoke effect to his shot of a monkey picking up a smoking cigarette.

This was the video clip he has given me:



I have used Maya to create the smoke and exported each image as a .png so that the background will be see through. I will then use After Effects to layer the smoke over the video and move it accordingly when the cigarette moves.

I created a 2D container and fluid emitter. It has then been a case of changing the settings to create the smoke effect. Cigarette smoke is quite slow and curly. It disperses quite quickly and is a light grey colour. All this was what I had to make my cigarette smoke look like.

With the emitter, the smoke creates a ball shape as it comes out of the emitter. So it looked more realistic, and looks like it is coming out of the end of the cigarette, I made a cylinder cigarette shape and coloured it bright green so that it could be keyed out in After Effects afterwards.

This was the smoke test in Maya.



When I put it into After Effects, the cigarette shape was harder to key out that imagined because of the shadow on the cylinder. When I tried to key out the shadow, the cigarette was a similar colour so it keyed out some smoke as well. The way I got around this was to create a layer mask over the cigarette rather than key it out so it will definitely cover the whole cigarette.

This was the final outcome when added to the video Russell gave me.



The smoke curling at the top is quite hard to see but the video is only a couple of seconds long so it doesn't matter too much. The only other thing that could be improved was a red tip on the cigarette so it looks like it is still alight but that would mean Russell would have to reshoot the whole shot.