Smoke letters. typography and design, simulation

Hello Again!

This series of smoking letters (capitals and small ones), digits, and signs is a sum of 3 months of simulations and rendering. It’s divided into 3 product packs due to VideoHive file size restrictions. So it’s divided into Capital smoking letters, Small smoking letters and Smoking digits with smoking signs.

PACKS available on Envato marketplace (links below)

Smoking capital letters: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Small letters: a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

Signs and digits: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 @ \ / ( ) , . $ = ! # – % + ? :

Tables of content:

I have chosen Aliquam font to be the base for the simulations because it’s nice looking and most of all it’s origins are close to Helvetica font which is one the best fonts on the planet but free to use (you can download it by clicking on the link). It’s easy to reshape the base of simulation (i.e. grid warp tool) and adjust it to almost every Helvetica based font out there. Simulation is made so the letters / signs / digits interact with the smoke. Well even to emit smoke. Every letter has it’s unique emission texture – that causes each smoke to start differently.

And at the same time I wanted it to give you the possibility to create words, sentences, cascades of letters (or even be used as just some smoke elements in explosion scene – my friend used it for that, and it worked :) That drove me to creating forces for the smoke letters so that the smoke wouldn’t go random direction (not entirely at least) and behave smokinglishly enough and at the same time behave in such way to not to cover letters that are next to each other (to some extent).

Sample videos:

Packs contains:

0_ReadMe
- well if you are reading this text, you have already found it ;)
1_Main_Files – you will find here mov files with smoking letters / signs / digits (depending on the product):
- ie: “X_800px.mov” – capital letter X
- ie: “X_800px_zDepth.mov” – zDepth for capital letter X
2_Bonus_Files
- Table of content – with 3 examples of usage (3 different grades) in form of 4000px/2700px mp4 h264 files
- h264 MP4 preview file

Technical mumbo jumbo:
The smoke letters were simulated in very high grid resolution, then rendered with 16bit color depth. Everything to meet film and TV production standards. Actually I have already used it in one TV commercial and one TV ident. With every smoke letter, smoke digit or smoke sign (yes I have made dollar sign too, might be useful… ;)

There’s depth map included (for creating depth of field, bokeh effects, depth compositing, grading it thru it’s Z axis, just whatever you want to use it for etc. ;). Last but not the least alpha is also included. Example: Capital X (frame 89 sample from raw render).

Tip: If you want to type with those letters, digits, signs just freeze (/ frame hold / time stop) the 1st frame of alpha channel (often it’s frame 0 – “zero”) and use it as normal RGB layer (shuffle) / or as a mask (matte) to some constant color (/solid) or even to a texture.