How to Create Dust Floating in the Air? Quite impressed by all of Gleb Alexandrov's scenes with some amazing dust floating around. 

(To see what I'm talking about > http://www.creativeshrimp.com/lighting-tutorial-atmospheric-effects-dust-book-10.html)

And I started working last night on a scene that is going to need the same sort of atmospheric dust in the air. But when I looked around on how to create dust particles in the air there was nothing there. Not even anything I could adapt from a tutorial. Everything was from 2009 before volumetrics was even introduced.

Someone in an older tutorial did use a particle system and used a scaled down icosphere as a mesh for each particle, but experimenting with that made everything look really tacky.

Is there a way to do dust particles that I'm not thinking of?
Mix an volumetric environment with a particle system:


density of volume scattering will determine the amount of microscopic dust particles that create light rays
particle system will add visible dust


Points to keep in mind:


create the light super-bright and scatter density tiny - that way the small particles get enough light.
give the particles translucent shader or a bit mixed-in emission if they are too dark
the particles need to appear small on camera so they blend with the light-shafts (smaller the better). Particles should be also random in size.


A closeup of such out-of-focus dust:



the black border is there to fight the white page background

Settings (depends on scene size, light distance and camera):


scatter density: 0.003
used light: Point, strength: 5000
particles: 1M
particle size: 0.015, random size: 100%
icosphere scale: 0.1