Digital smoke, dust, fog and so on ?

Heya

So I am thinking about particle type effect from a while now. Smoke dust etc etc. I was wondering what is the best way to generate them and render. I am looking at 66.6mega pixel images (10k+).

Now heres what I want to get

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1167/3353400638\_db4b19f4b4.jpg


http://eagleandthebear.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/ddt-concert-flares.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/\_K9qf7QhvI9c/SDD7cysolqI/AAAAAAAAAfQ/GclfLkiiwj4/s400/Rock+Concert.bmp

Now I know we got volume fog, volume light, a fog types, a smoke from fume and so on so on.

The problem is that its hard to light it up, and they not detail/complex or simply takes AGES to render and precalculate… They also (in my opinion) lack depth, they quite flat renders even after post its just looks different than if id pick camera and take a shot…

The idea is to just put a smoke spawner(or whatever) and then spend time on lighting up and simply playing than spending hours on setting the scene up for excat shot.

Any idea? I’m currently researching in to AE plugins that can generate particle smoke…

Phoenix can do all that & more…why not try the DEMO???
The best thing is that it’s so quick & easy to get good lighting

Humh
Buts its vertex/pixel based (cant remember naming) like Fume right? Which mean to get high quality smoke at 10k would require a lot of samples… or I’m wrong ?

Either way will try it out soon

For really tiny detail a lot of folks sim using fume or phoenix, then render by passing particles through the sim movement and render in krakatoa - you can use a fairly low res sim but still render with incredible sharpness.