Create spreading smoke in a building

Hello,

So for an university project one of my parts is to create spreading smoke. We are not studying computer science and have little to no experience with unreal.
So my job is to make the smoke spread through the building (ignoring closed doors), detecting if the player is inside the smoke and if he blacks out and dies.
There are two solutions that came to my mind:

  1. Animating everything per hand (which is quite frustrating because it would be quire a lot of work (around 30 doors and quite a few rooms))
    2)Using the particle effect to spread it.

So as I said, we are not experienced with unreal and wont be using it in the future. My question is: In my situation is there another good way to solve this problem? Or which of this 2 ways would you advice?

Thanks in advance!