I made this thing:

I don’t know what it is but its neat.

The column+coil is built around taking the animation frame counter, doing some math to make a sine-wave and using that as a blend factor between a few colors. Here’s a better zoom.

Not much more to show of this, the base is too shiny IMO but I was surprised how easy it was to make dynamic textures in blender. The volume aspect I hooked up just to see what it would look like and I dug it. In the future I should learn a bit more about how that plays into things but for now I’m happy with my cheap smoke.