Tim Hawker Match Moving Blog

Let there be smoke!

I want my arm to dissolve away to show the bones underneath, and decided turning into smoke would be a good way of acheiving this. I used 3ds Max’s particle flow emitter, and created a customised particle flow chart to produce the desired result. I’ve found a really good way of creating very realistic smoke with friendy render times :) The arm dissapearing was created by animating a material to have a white strip move down it, and the particles are only emmitted when the material is white. I masked out the original footage as the smoke moved down, to reveal a layer underneath with the bone render and rotoscoped footage.