For a recent project I needed to render dust clouds in a 3D environment when a virtual creature stepped on the ground. I found a number of papers describing techniques on the web for approaching this and I list them here so I can find them again easily or for anyone else who may be interested in the subject.
Although I prototyped a number of the approaches, in the end I opted for a very simple particle engine since that's all that was needed at the time and I needed to 'get things done'. All I did was track the limb of the creature as it reached the ground and on lift-off emitted the particles with 'dust-like' behaviour. One day maybe I'll revisit the much more sophisticated techniques outlined in some of these papers.
My first explorations was to read about particle engines, then onto dust specific papers:
A useful list of documents in related themes is Readings in Physically Based Animation.
12:20:33 AM 
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