Just a quick question here:
Whats the different ways to shade particles?

these i'm aware of:
spirits
lines, spheres tubes, etc in mantra
metaballs or other geo copied on the particles

is there away to shade them as volumes? like hypervoxeles in LW ?

thanks!

You can also render the particles as points, by checking Render As Points on the Geometry node containing the particles. I believe this is the fastest way to render particles in Mantra. I don't know much about LW's hypervoxels, but rendering as points can be used to create interesting volumetric effects.

Dan

You can go to the Shelf, click on the ‘+’ button, select Download Shelf… and download the FX Tools.

After the download, there is a Heavy Smoke Tool and you can look inside the Object to see how it uses a particle system & metaballs to be rendered as smoke.

Cheers!
steven