That's probably one of the hardest things to pull off.
Smoke trails may be the easiest of what you're asking, especially if you illuminate the interior near the source with fiber optics, but dust or sand clouds, that's really tough.
The only way I'd try it would be if your perspective was dictated by one point, in other words you are only looking from one plane like the front of an aquarium and then I'd try to insert multiple planes of clear styrene lightly dusted with the appropriate translucent color. That way, you'd have one level of obfuscation before the model, then building levels as the distance increases.