If you mean using billboards, Andreas Glad created a tutorial for this a while back using Houdini to generate the cloud shape for emitters to spawn on. Apparently he used this technique on Battlefield 1, with very nice results (shown toward the end of the video).
I’m tempted to say you’d still be better off using Unreal’s volumetric clouds system though, provided you’re comfortable working with volume materials, as you can get more plausible self shadowing and extinction, and fewer artifacts with orbiting camera shots.
That being said, Ryan Brucks also has another article on his blog about raymarching a heightfield and I’ve been curious if that could be combined with the billboard based effect to improve the result… something to think about.