create smoke wich looks like a character

[CLODIO]

I had to create a character wich seems to came out of a cigarette smoke. First I think to a mesh of the character with a particular material. But if anyone had a better way ( particules or other ...)
sorry for my english, I'm french.

[mike yucka]

Try to make this animation in reverse.

Make your character and use that character as your partical emitter. Give the particles a smoke texture.

Animate your particals along a spline to the cigarrette, or use a wind spacewarp to direct the particals.

Make your character mesh invisible to the camera so it looks like your character was created from smoke only.

Animate the particles by starting them at negative frame numbers. (for example, if your animation is 100 frames long, start your animation parameters at -100 to 0. Usefull later on.)

Once the animation looks good, now you can export it. There are two ways, to reverse your movie.

1. In Max 5, you can reverse the keys in your Dope Sheet. I'm not sure this works with particles as they basically do not generate keyframes, but it is worth a shot.

2. Because we setup the animation from -100 to 0, we can render out the animation as seperate pictures and assemble them into a video editing package. When you import numbered images into a video editing program, most do not understand the negative (-) symbol and therefore ignore it. It will asseble the frames from 0 to 100, actually reversing the frames for you.