I'm trying to produce a plume of steam for use over hot liquids - i.e. a separate nif that can be placed in the CS where needed - so I started looking for a smoke equivalent that I could re-color to get a steam effect. However there appear to be two types of meshes - one is a conical volume in which a particle effect operates, and the other is a billboard that combines the smoke effect with the flame, and usually include sparks as well, making it harder to separate what I need.

When I tried placing the volumetric smoke to get an impression of scale, I see only the bounding box in the CS, and nothing appears in the game. It's possible my game settings are suppressing the smoke, but if I can do that unintentionally, so can anyone else, and I don't want to use an effect that's so easy to turn off. Doing the same with the fire effects cloned and the flames deleted gave me a similar issue, so I may have to live with it.

Does anyone have a good understanding of how smoke works, and can teach me to steam? Or just point me at an existing one if I've overlooked it!

Phitt's Explosives mod had some nice smoke effects. You could ask him.

Just wondering, could you re-texture the frost effect, perhaps? I'm not at my Modding Computer, so can't remember the exact name I'm afraid, but it's an actual .nif as far as I understand with a kind of mist/frost effect. I think it's under Dungeons/Misc--> you'd know it if you see it. Maybe make it a little more transparent would give a reasonable stead effect (like distorting the air, rather than visible steam)...

Steam needs the "rising with heat" part from smoke, so I suspect frost effects would not be a complete answer, but the texture might be worth stealing once I get the mechanics of the particle systems worked out and understood.