Two Questions Dynamic Paper & text to smoke in Maya

Hey all, forgive me, I am not a 3D guy at all really. But I have to be for a project.

#1
I need to have a bunch of pieces of paper flying past the camera (each one has an animation on it). Rather than just parade flat cards past the camera, I’d like to do something more dynamic -so that the edges of the paper curl in and out slightly based on the animation… much like real paper falling, that would catch wind pockets, etc.

I looked into nCloth and some IK ideas – I think the best thing I have come up with is a jiggle deformer, with the weights inverted on the inner and outer vertices of a plane. But this doesn’t totally work. nCloth is cool, but more of a beast than I want to deal with for this animation.

#2
Smoke. This one is killing me. I’ve used 3D containers, particles, nParticles… I just can’t seem to get what I want. I did better making a perlin noise gizmo in Nuke to do this. I’ve looked everywhere, and no tutorial is quite exactly what I want.

Basically, I import a block of text from Illustrator – like "WELCOME TO" – Extrude it a little, etc. Standard stuff. This comes flying at the camera, and right before it breaks frame, the text breaks/morphs into smoke that continues flying at the camera until it evaporates/fades away.

I’m fine with rendering two passes and blending in Nuke or something… but I can’t seem to get a 3D container to make the smoke right. Also, I don’t want a continual steam of smoke, just one puff from the letters. I also want the letters to deform with the smoke.

Any ideas or points in the right direction are much obliged… I’ll buy you a cookie one day!

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