An animation done with Blender using a mix of 2D animation and 3D models.
The grease pencil tool (that basically allows you do draw in the 3D space) upgraded in blender 2.8 was of great use to draw details on surfaces. I learned a lot from analysing Dedouze’s 2.82 splash screen file.
For the smoke I used an emitter with particles rendered as spheres, textured with the same “toonish” custom material. I also used a blend texture on particles to animate the scale of these spheres along their lifetime. Added buoyancy, wind, turbulence and tweaked it quite a lot.
The project was initially to model a small flying city and have this boat float around… That may be for another time.