I did and didn’t like it. I have my own technique for generating large skyes using plane, clouds texture, ztransp and array. Works quite well imo.
And this particle technique is perfect for cloud closeups and smoke,
I think i will stick with thies for the time being, until there is propper volumetric in blender.
Step by step tutorial, anybody? 
I think its best just to ask. And make sure to check out the latest issue of Blenderart magazine. In my eyes its the best issue to date. Particles, compositing, materials, textures, etc.
A great particle smoke tutorial.
And in other news Farsthary’s volumetrics build should make the old billboard methods obsolete.
There’s not a build out for Windows, but you can try it on Mac. and Linux and I believe it destroys the need for billboards.
Nah. They’ve been saying for years that voxels, ray marching, etc. would replace billboard sprite based methods. But as with scanline rendering versus raytracing. Its the faster method that gets the production out that will be used. Time is money. Volumetrics will definitely be useful in specific circumstances though!
I have used Alan’s Cloud Generator and found it to be indispensable for flythroughs. I did have to do some tweaking to the spacing of planes to remove crash-through artifacts but it was the quickest way to give me that volumetric effect. It renders very fast.
Could you explain your method riko-kun? I found arrays of planes too rough around the edges for HD resolution work.
Dunno about hires, but i’m using it for large skyes and it looks aceptable to me. There was a thread about it some time ago here:http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=111646&highlight=riko-kun
I was toying with it few days ago and this is what i get in very short amount of time:
Not perfect technique, but it have it’s uses imo.
Thanks riko-kun. I checked out your thread and I like the result for the application you employed. For fly-throughs, though, I don’t thing this would work so well – but it could easily be used for adding distant cloud layers. Nice work!
That’s exactly what this technique is good for. Of course it woul’d look silly from close, but in the distance is not so bad and it’s quick 
There’s a cloud generator created by my now good friend, alan:). Check it out and give it a shot, but don’t overdo the billboards because it might crash. I’ve had many lost projects to prove that (and many sad moments over empty tmp folders if you know what I mean ;).