This week I spent entirely messing with the sand emitter. Carefully looking at the reference and my FX breakdown, I came to realize that I would need 2 sets of simulations. One for the dense sand that lifts up and goes back down. The other is a larger area of sand that is dusty. I started with the emitter for the large sand smoke. I was able to use the "Particle Fluid Surface" Node to convert the points into a volume and use that to source my Pyro simulation. After messing around with the various settings like disturbance and even going back to the POPnet, I was able to get a good first pass of the dusty sand.
For the dense sand emitter, I turned up the number of particles and added a random pscale of a very small amount to give that dense sand look. I tweaked the POPnet setup until I had something that matched the way the reference sand kicks up and goes back down fast.
Here is my WIP for the week!