Blender : Animating smoke with Blender By Saraja Olivier

Please call the Animation buttons (F7-KEY or  button). Click on the  button, then click on the  button and hold to have time to select the Particles effect. You should have this familiar sight.

In the Display Buttons (F10-KEY), we see that the default rendering speed of Blender is set to 25 Frames/s. Just as before, to synchronize these two effects, we will undertake a 10s animation (250 Frames). For a light smoke, you don't need more than 2000 particles. For a thicker smoke, like for a good raging inferno, a tire fire or a kerozen fire, you can set up to 4000 and even more if you want a huge smoke column ! In this tutorial, we will set Tot: 2000, which will harmonize lovingly with our previous fire. Set Sta: -250.00 and  End: 250.00 to synchronize both particles systems. As you wish a fairly lasting smoke, try Life: 100.00 and RandLife: 0.200 values. Use the same Rand value than your fire (Rand: 0.025 for instance). You can master the heigth of your smoke column with the Force Z button. Try different values, around the double of the value used for the fire: Force Z: 0.300.

Toggle to front view (NUM-1). Check the animation of your particles system with ALT+A (ESC to stop the animation). Once again, you'll note that your emitter spits its particles in a sorted way which is not natural. As before, we will fix this by entering edit mode (TAB), selecting all the vertices (A-KEY) and going into the Edit buttons (F9-KEY). Find the  button and click on it. The particles system should now appear with more randomness. You can check the result by pressing ALT+A again.