Coffee Cup
 

Here's a coffee cup I'm working on. Can't seem to get the smoke to work. I try a hardware render but it says my graphics card can't handle it. But in Mental Ray it comes out like this.

what kind of particles are they?

Well they were multipoint. But Now i'm messing around with "cloud" .. it looks like my graphics card can render those but I can't find out how to get it to work:S

Here's the update

the smoke effect uses sprite particles

the coffee looks like a solid block more than liquid

also need to do something about that light of yours. the shadow looks all noisy

otherwise, the cup itself looks cool :)

I think another issue with the light is that it's either too bright or is just too close to the objects. I can see areas that are burnt out, especially on the plane.

Goodness I can't figure out how to use sprite particles it just looks like blocks. Anyone know of particle tutorials or something?

at this point in time i can only think of the one you pay for at digital tutors, Introduction to Dynamics

the smoke effect is a bunch of sprite particles, sprite particles are always facing you and can be replaced with a texture of somesort. makes for easy billboarding...

but the smoke effect is pretty good i think. just have a play with the attributes

There used to be a tutorial that went over making cigarette smoke.

If it were me I would emit the particles from the surface of the coffee and then use the cloud type with ramps to control opacity, size etc etc and random life.

Ohh and add turbulance and possible a slight wind field with a slight random expression on them to give it a bit of variation