I've been wanting to do a tornado for some time so I decided to try and tackle it. No surprise - the tornado is done using a smoke sim. However, I started with a particle system as the emitter and I didn't like it because it looked "clumpy" no matter how much I tweaked it. So I went to a simple cylinder as the emitter and got much better results after some minor adjustments.
I really wanted to show the power of the tornado by including a barn being ripped apart but also wanted the lighting source to be entirely lightning. This proved to be an interesting composition challenge from a scene layout perspective. I'm still not entirely pleased where I landed on the layout but I had to draw the line somewhere.
Any suggestions/ideas for future storm scenes (I love storms) is much appreciated.
Made entirely in Blender
