Creating interesting steam particle system

My client wants a steam particle system that follows similar properties to this:

I am at a loss as to how to achieve this currently.

I have a few concepts that have vortex smoke properties but rendered lighter to imitate steam. How ever these do not generate that sort of body consistency that the steam has in the video. I also can't work out how to get the steam to spike randomly.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers,

~ Ryan K

 

I've looked around for this for a long time. The closest I could find was a cartoony version using line renderers, and even that didn't look too great.

I'd suggest you just find some sort of premade video asset somewhere and use that rather than trying to create it in code (I looked way too long and found nothing)

 

If your target platform is a DX11 pc you may be interested in this article
http://scrawkblog.com/2014/01/09/gpu-gems-to-unity-3d-fluid-simulation/
Its about fire but im sure you can convert it to smoke only.

 

I have a solution that's relatively cheap (computationally, not monetarily) if you're willing to work with some fairly early code. It's not a particle simulation, but a replacement for the trail renderer used for creating 'wisp' or 'ribbon' -type effects.

The ones shown in this video are longer than you want for your coffee effect, but a shorter one would probably work fine.

The only downside to this sort of solution is it is not very 3d (since it relies on the built-in line-renderer component, which is a billboard that always faces camera), when compared to a GPU particle solution (which should look perfect from any angle).