Environmental Animation - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 374

Figure 13.18 The Smoke panel and Domain controls.
Add a cube to your scene and scale it so that it encompasses everywhere you would like smoke to appear.
LMB click the Add button in the Smoke panel of its Physics properties, and set it to be the Domain .
Figure 13.18 shows both the cube in the 3D view and the Smoke panel with Domain controls. Notice
how the domain cube has been scaled horizontally.
The Resolution: Divisions field controls the overall resolution of the simulation. It defaults to 32, which
is a decent choice. Pressing Alt-A in the 3D view shows immediate results. It's not quite real time, but
the feedback is good. Figure 13.19 shows the smoke simulation at this stage. If things are intolerably slow,
you can reduce the resolution, but you shouldn't need to make this value much higher. There is another
option for generating high-resolution smoke.
The Gravity setting does exactly what you'd think. Higher gravity values tend to pull the smoke down
instead of up. Heat affects the rate at which smoke rises.
Smoke is subject to the same force fields as the other Physics systems, and their influence on it can be
adjusted in the Smoke Field Weights panel. In the example scene, I had to turn Wind influence down
to almost 0 to prevent the smoke from being blown completely out of the domain object right away.
Smoke Materials
The second half of getting results of the smoke simulator lies in using a Volume material. Finding the
setup is the tricky part. After you have that, you can play around to achieve different results.