This was a really fun exploration of smoke simulations! I started by modeling the smoke stack in Maya then texturing it in Houdini. From there, I used Billowy Smoke in Houdini to get a basic smoke simulation that I could shape and direct to look like this. Then I got some cool cyan light in there to bring it all together.
I had issues figuring out how to change the smoke color, but it was just a matter of making a basic smoke shader and applying it to the correct node (smoke_import). I also forgot to unwrap the smoke stack in Maya, so I applied a UV Unwrap node in Houdini to take care of that. Moving forward, I’d like to fix some noise in the material and reinforce the smoke so it doesn’t phase through the tube (which I made a static object to avoid this issue, but I’ll need to investigate further).