Adding Smoke to the Collapsing Building

Similar to how we created the debris particles for the destruction effect, you will need to take some stock footage of smoke, place it in its own composition and mask it out. Note I added quite a lot of feathering to this mask to make the smoke blend out smoothly around the edges. I called this composition ‘Dust Particle Comp’.

Create another solid in the Building Comp and call it ‘Dust Particles’. Add the Dust Particle Comp with our smoke texture into the composition and disable its visibility just like we did for the concrete debris.

Apply the CC Particle World effect to the Dust Particles solid. Position the Producer correctly in your 3D scene at the base of the fake building. Animate the birth rate and the size of the producer to spawn a large number of particles horizontally along the base of the building just as it starts to collapse. Imagine the building throwing up a large cloud of smoke as it falls in on itself.

Next, assign the Smoke Particle Comp as the texture for the particles. Increase the particle size until you have a nice and solid smoke cloud appearing over the collapsing building. This starts to look quite cool, but gravity still pulls the smoke particles downwards which looks rather unrealistic.

In the physics tab of the CC Particle World effect, set the Animation to ‘Viscouse’. Then tweak the velocity and gravity settings until your smoke slowly drifts off from where it is being spawned. I set the gravity to negative to make the smoke slowly drift upwards.

You should now see a nice fat smoke cloud sit right over the building during the destruction effect. Feel free to tweak this to your liking or darken the smoke with some colour adjustments if you prefer. I went with a very grey look to match the concrete look of the fake building I was destroying.

If you go back to the parent composition you should now see the building collapse into a cloud of smoke and the cloud should sit realistically behind the foreground buildings we defined.

The very last thing to do is to add some lighting being cast by the explosions onto nearby buildings to blend the destruction effect nicely into our skyline.