Been trying to recreate this lovely portal effect from Star Trek: Picard specifically the hair like black smoke around the edges.


From the attached video reference, you can see the black smoke behaves like hair/trails but also like a liquid. My approach to get a smoke like sim while maintaining insane level of details is to use FLIP (i.e. advected particles + non-divergent velocity field for nice swirls and so on).

I've attached my simple implementation of an attribute controlled viscosity based FLIP sim. I'm struggling with achieving the hair like streaks and I would appreciate your feedback and suggestions. A more sparse flipbook of the sim results is attached as well.

Use a lot of particles and rasterize attributes, into density, also one could advect the particles with a low-res smoke sim

Thanks Daniel, I've tried the smoke sim route but wasn't able to get this viscous breaking effect seen in the reference that's why I decided to go with flip to get the best of both worlds between pure particle physics and non-divergent smoke dynamics. My main issue is achieving the hair like fine details. As you'll see in my test attached below using a rasterization technique similar to what you suggest, the general movement is similar but it still looks a bit too “blobby”. I've even added a second layer of details using a vellum wire sim advected by the results of the main sim. Just very curious about other ideas to get super fine details without necessarily having to simulate at insane resolutions which I'm not sure would even achieve this look.

To clarify: I'm referring to the details in the black smoke layer of the reference, the firey bit is not that hard to achieve even in a low res smoke sim.

make a circle, copy lines to the points in the circle

add mountain sop with animation, add v along the curves

make particles from the circle been advected by the velocity of the curves.