What Brian and Angie said. Â Got a Wacom tablet? Â ...This really is the perfect time to just draw some smoke puffs in Photoshop or Illustrator and bring them into AE. Â Or animate some shape layers in AE. Â In the hour or two you spend researching ways to do it with a plugin, you could have 5 different versions finished that look just like the example.
That said, we did do some toon-shaded 3D fluid renders from Maya for a project in the past that looked pretty good. Â But that's orders of magnitude more complicated if you just need a little poof. Â :)
- N