The Detective

I always wanted to dabble into noir type renders, and I finally got around to do so. Using one of the human base meshes from the official Blender asset pack as a starting point, I then modeled and sculpted the face using a bunch of reference images.

When it came to simulating the smoke, I again realized how slow Blender's fluid sims are, and bit the bullet and finally bought Embergen. That made the workflow so much faster and more intuitive.

Post-processing was done in Affinity Photo with the trusty old Nik Collection.