I am trying to make it so that in a scene I am making the wind kicks up a couple of dust clouds for a few seconds, but I am having trouble finding out how to do this.
I was suggested to use the smoke system, but the result is not quite what I am looking for and most of the time it doesn’t even work, with the smoke just popping in out of nowhere in the middle of the animation.
Is there a better way to do this with partciles, or is there a good tutorial available to use smoke in this way?
You can go some an external animation and load it in your scene as a transparent image(s).
You can use particles as is (not in the smoke sim) and do your own wizardry.
The smoke sim is just a predefined configuration of those particles.
Because it’s hard to do, lots of trial and error.
I would say study the basics of particles. Gravity, weight of the particles, friction, using force fields to simulate wind, etc…
FedPete’s advice are good options, but I thought that I might throw another option out there.
Something like this “Grenade Dust Impact”(CC0) might work, but I think it would take a little work in the node editor to give it the appearance of wind blowing up the dust.