Smoke (Illuminating Particles)

After Wednesday's lesson in class on how to create smoke in After Effects with particles, I decided to research a little more and found a whole tutorial on Video Copilot that shows you how to create an entire smoke screen. It provides you with the project files and gives you a 20 minutes walk-through of how to create it.

The smoke he creates with particles looks really realistic, and can be used for anything that could involve steam, smoke, fog, or clouds. Considering at least one of these elements is in almost every scene I think it's a very useful tutorial, especially since the end product looks so good.

For my project in particular, I want steam to be moving when I show the streets of London. This tutorial is perfect for that and allows me to create the dirty image of industrial London. I don't know if anyone else is doing something similar for their project but I thought it looked really nice, so it's worth checking out.