There are a lot of tools out there that can create smoke effect in Cinema 4D. X-Particles, to TFD (Turbulence FD), to Krakatoa, just to name a few. It’s not necessary to have some type of fluid simulation drive the effort, but it does help.
Watch Bob Walmsley show his method for realistic wispy smoke effect in Cinema 4D. Which if the three mentioned tools does he use? All of them. Bob uses TFD to create the base fluid based simulation for the wispy smoke. Then uses that output to drive X-Particles in C4D, for rendering.
The entire simulation is then pushed to a much higher resolution using ThinkBox Krakatoa.
Krakatoa is a CPU-Based, multi-threaded renderer for volumetric particles, on Windows or MacOS. Using a special loader (PRT), you can load all kinds of Cinema 4D based particle systems to work in Krakatoa.
