This is Harder Than I Thought

Hello all, it's me again. I have made a daring endeavor by try to combine a couple tutorials together for my first project, as I talked about in my previous blog. The effect I am trying to recreate is a "demon" (smoke form) going inside a person, as seen below.

Now this effect is actually harder than it seems. I have looked into  exact tutorial on this effect, but most of them are not crisp and clear as I would want them to be. I then looked at Andrew Kramer's site for Video Copilot. I found a flying smoke similar to the effect in the example video above. I attempted to format the Video Copilot tutorial to the project I was doing, but unfortunately it did not work as I wanted it to.

This is where I will be coming into the career of animation strong. In major animation careers, they do not get to watch tutorials to figure out how to do their entire project, they have to mess with the settings, lighting and sound all on their own and with their own knowledge with the program and animation.

(Top: Andrew Kramer,
Bottom: Original PIXAR Team )

At this point I am actually only about a class period behind schedule, and at the same time I am still ahead on the project, it's just creating the effects without anything to look off of is difficult. A big problem I have been having though is having the smoke get darker. I have played with the color for about three days now and it just won't balance out to be the dark black/gray color. I hope to get this figured out by late this week, early next week.

Here is the final render of the demon possession video FX I did. the entire animation was not complete, but I still understand all of the content and can use it towards other projects i the future.