Well, if you know afterburn you'd know how to make the effect, and afterburn is relatively simple to learn.
The main thing with afterburn is getting the particle motion right, you could do it with animated mesh and sticky particles, but i'm fairly sure he didnt, it looks like two particle systems for the main upwards clouds, a dusty one that gets drawn inwards and that main one that goes out along the ground with random puff size. (From what I can gather)
The material based on density + distance and all that, as well as the glowing and displacement kind of effect is all done within afterburn. Afterburn just adds those puffs to the particles.
But with fumefx
fluid to the max I say!
When I get some time, i'll throw together some proper afterburn video tutorials explaining how it works and some cool things you can do with it. (the one I've got on the3dstudio is pretty crap)
