I've just recently gotten my company interested in actually purchasing a license of Houdini. My first project has an object dropping to the ground causing a shockwave of dust. The object lands with a thud, no damage or destruction.

I know basics with Houdini, but I'm not very familiar with FX. Can someone point me to a good tutorial, maybe make a sample scene, or give me pointers on the steps that I might need to work through. I don't need this to be movie quality, just decent.

Was thinking of maybe using the explosions and just trying to tweak it down a bit?

Thanks for any ideas!

Johnny has a couple of dust base smoke scenes you could check out.
https://vimeo.com/224462570 [vimeo.com]
https://vimeo.com/241426438 [vimeo.com]