Hey Rohan,
awesome renders, I really need to test Octane
The pure volumetric approach is very clever, didn't think about that when I was doing my experiments. My goal was to get the look of the light particles traveling through the volume, but heating the volume with the particles could work also, have to test that. 6 minutes rendertime are much better, the best I could get was around 30 minutes with still very noticeable noise...
Cheers,
Chris