Model and Rig made in Blender
Sculpting details in ZBrush
Rendered in Cycles
Textured in Photoshop
Background Rocks Captured in Photoscan
I wanted to make a cool looking smoke, thick almost solid like, and instead of wasting hours in the simulation I modeled the smoke using a primitive shape, procedural textures and a particle system, it makes a great way to make smoke in a controlled way, most likely not for animation though. but maybe.
after all that I added a quick simulation just to add a bit of dissipation of the original shape.
after the shape was done, a quick volume shader from cycles was used and this was the result. the background is a set of stones from a beach I visited a few weeks back and captured them using photogrammetry.