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Comments
You already have some volumetric effects built into daz. Go to > Shader Presets > omnifreaker > uber volume. You can create smokey cones and spheres using these but i believe it works like a shader you can apply to other primitives. (Haven't tested that sorry)
As far as the volumetric camera is concerned, thats more for light rays from spotlights and the like. It's easy volume camera is a thing of beauty and lets you chose only the lights you want to have the effect on. The big gotcha being that it does not work with progressive rendering so you should turn that off before rendering a scene through that camera.
Personally I think you would be better off with the shaders for what you want to do. Especially if you can use them on primitives since you can just morph the primitive using magnets into a shape you want.
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I have fire and smoke. It works OK.
However, I had a TON of great luck with Ron's Explosions pack, which includes smoke. This is not something you render, but that you add in postwork in Photoshop. You get a huge file with 50 or 60 or so smoke effect images, on a transparent background, and you can import them into your scene.
Below is an example from a webcomic I am working on. This is a girl who was hit with a fire blast that destroyed her clothes but did not harm her because she has super-powers (and she looks surprised because before she got hit, she never knew she had powers). I worked on it for an evening, I guess. I am very happy with the result.
It would be very hard to achieve this same effect with fire and smoke. You could do it, but it would take a lot more fussing than I had to do in PS with Ron's explosion smoke.
Most of the render in solutions will use volumetrics....which, by there nature will significantly increase render times. The 'quickest' method is usually adding the effect in post work, like illustrated above.
There are various options...
There's the option of doing the smoke in postwork.
Here's some brushes:
http://www.daz3d.com/smoking
http://www.daz3d.com/rons-steam-and-smoke
http://www.daz3d.com/rons-smoke
Then, there's options which "render", like
http://www.daz3d.com/jepes-steamz
http://www.daz3d.com/fog-for-studio
AOA Fog is great and easy to use, but I'm not sure it will give you the effect you are looking for, as it's more suitable to create Haze and such.
Fire and Smoke is easy to use. Just load the prop, apply the material you want, and scale it to the size you want. You can also adjust the density of the smoke.
I've attached some pics for illustration - first is AOA Atmospheric Fog, set to a low density.
The second is Fire and smoke. I used three different colors on the smoke prop, in case you wonder. :-)
The third is from Jepes GraphicZ (set at 64% opacity%).
Note that Jepes FX are planes, while Fire and Smoke is Bubble-shapes, but you get a lot of mileage out of both, with little effort.
Of course, you can also combine them.
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That looks great! :-)
Personally, I often use Jepe's FX materials. Or a combination of several of the FX products, which gets great effects even when just doing a render. Of course, you can perfect your render with postwork, which is why Ron's brushes sets are highly recommended. All of them. :-)
Here are two renders - one using various of Jepes FX, and the other is the AOA Atmosheric camera combines with postworked smoke from Ron's Smoke 2 set (which also can be used in GIMP, btw.).
Thanks. Andt thanks again for the help. =)