eetu
What a gorgeous visual and what an awesome problem
I have no clear pointers, but I know you've come to the right software for the task!
Thinking about it, how about a pyro sim, but do not render the hot parts - only when the gas has cooled down? Or maybe not render even that, but use those areas to spawn particles? how you would get those to form nice rigid-ish crystalline structures I don't know.. Maybe some aggregation growth would work on that..
Anyway, good luck, and I'm eagerly awaiting what you come up with!
Thanks My approach for the harder ice structures so far is this (c4d skinned x-particles emitting from geo) It looks OK - but the tendrils look a lot more chaotic and less elegant than in the reference. And also yeah, the issue with my approach before is that I was basically taking that mesh and sticking a TFD smoke sim on top of it, so everything was in a binary state - either solid or gas, which I think looses a lot of the subtlety and beauty of the concept art… it just looked like.. well smoke comped over geo.
So what would be advantage of rendering only the hot parts of a pyro sim rather than just using a smoke sim to begin with?