Since Stager doesn't support any sort of simulations such as VDB yet, I tried to create smoke/cloud effect with other ways.

To begin with, you need photos of smoke, cloud or fog. (Or what ever you might want to use)

In this tutorial I used two (quite low resolution) samples which are taken from:
https://www.brusheezy.com/brushes/2187-24-clouds (by Mila Vasileva)

Once you have your photos, you have to make them white with a black background in order to get
the best results.
You can use same method as here with brushes, orget somephotos from Adobe Stock for example!

Once you have made your photo, open Stager and add Plane. Other objects might work as
well, for example Spheres if you want to have some curvature in your smoke.
Next step is to add your photo in to the Opacity map of the plane. (You can drag & drop it in there)

I played around with the settings a bit. With this scene I set Roughness to 20%, Emission 25% and Translucence up to 1.

With roughness and translucence you can control how much of transparency you get.
With emission you can easily add some brightness.

You can get even better results when playing around more with the properties and
environment lightning.

Here are some artworks where I've used this technique:


Thanks for reading, please check out the original tutorial and more at www.mattit.design[mattit.design]!