New in blender is a physically based volume material type, intended for rendering participating media, such as smoke, clouds, fog, and other volumetric effects. All procedural textures are supported as data sources, as well as two new textures for rendering voxels (such as our the smoke simulator) and point clouds.
A. Panagiotidis, S. Frey, and T. Ertl. Eurographics Conference on Visualization (EuroVis) - Short Papers, page 13-17. The Eurographics Association, (2015)