Found cool video explaining how explosions/smoke is done in Fallout 4, with particular moment where rendered in 3D app smoke is looped:
How can I loop smoke sim in Blender to be able to produce similar atlas texture ? (it’s used for a particle billboard, where texture atlast is played in a loop)
Thanks
As far as I know smoke sim cannot be loop. I am interest how to do this in blender too.
Right. I don’t think any sim can be looped out of the box.
If you have rendered sequence in VSE as strip, cutting it in half and swapping left and right sides of the strip will make it seamless, but in the middle, where original start/end of sequence meet you will have a step. How to nicely smooth that transition is the question.
Another thing is how to make alpha that isn’t the same as smoke sim. I would assume we can have second sim rendered and post-processed to be less detailed, but how to add it as alpha to the frames of the original sequence? (the idea is to automate process - I don’t see myself doing it in GIMP, frame by frame 
)
I think there would be a way to loop it using the VSE. This is just spitballing, so bear with me.
If you create a simple smoke sim and then in the VSE have it fade out after x frames. Then have the file repeat every x/2 frames (also before frame 0), so that at frame 0 and frame x it is the same. Smooth transitions should then be achieved.
Not sure if that makes sense to anyone but me…
Is it Alpha Cross, or something like that, effect strip?
I was thinking alpha over. If the smoke sim is 10 frames long, you would have it repeating and overlaying every 5 frames so that every 10th frame is the same.
Hey, did you figure out how to get a smoke column to look similar to the example? I’m trying to create a smoke fountain and always end up with a smoke bomb.
Nope. I find Blender’s smoke sim odd. Doesn’t seem there are too many tutorials on how to make effects for game’s particles with Blender 
I can’t get neither explosion puffs/balls, nor what’s in that example.