Great tutorial on how to do this here: www.youtube.com/watch

If you make the vehicle itself and the accompanying figures dusty in their own respective finishes, you won't even have to model the dust clouds. The viewer's own brain will "fill in" the cloud in their own vision of the scene.

I was looking to do a permanent scene, but your suggestion here I'll have to try sometime.

Thanks.

Don't know that I have ever seen dust modeled. The closet would be smoke from cannon fire. I believed they used cotton or angels hair. Looked pretty good but it was a photo.

There is another way ;

    Take a box of fine dusty dirt the color you need and place a clear box where the vehicle would go .Then Step Back till you get the right angle and just as you trigger the camera have someone turn on a hair dryer out of sight .

Then photo shop that to a translucent piece of plexi and display the vehicle in the right place and photograph again . This has worked for a friend of mine with his 1/48 scale armor !

I think the cotton balls are what I remember seeing. I think they used them for a smoke effect from an explosion. Had them painted with reds and yellows. The one I saw was pretty convincing from a photo of it.

Maybe it won't be a dusty scene after all, just dust on the vehicle. Thanks everyone.

I have seen it done using cotton balls that have been pulled apart to make them more wispy and then sprayed sandy, dusty colors.  It looks OK, but is not totally convincing.  As the others have said, smoke, dust and the likes are hard to model.

Shep's Victory at Trafalgar diorama was similar. He delighted in blowing cigar smoke into the model!

Yeah, outside of a photo I can't imagine anyway to do this other than to put everything into a shadow box where you can only view the scene from one angle and then add the 'dust' to the glass you're looking though.

How do you model air?  Smoke, dust, sand, snow, rain.  All of this is something in the atmosphere.  The atmosphere is air.