You've got several options there. First of all, start with a material that
has a single saturated diffuse colour, and set its transparency to additive.
Don't bother trying to make a gradient from deep colours through bright
colours to white - that'll never look like
sparks/energy/lightning/space-magic. Additive blending of saturated colours
generates those colour transitions
naturally and looks a lot better. Don't worry about the lack of an alpha
channel, either - energy effects don't need them, and any compositor who
says otherwise is just plain wrong.
For the particles themselves, you could use large-ish facing particles, with
a face-mapped radial gradient for their material's opacity map. This lets
you get away with using relatively few particles, which is great if the
particles are moving in complex ways, but it takes a while to render, as the
particles overlap.
You could use tiny (pixel-sized) facing particles instead, which will render
faster, but you'll need many more particles to flesh it out, so it'll take
longer to prepare geometry. This method's nice because you don't have to
bother with an opacity map, and you can switch off antialiasing and go nuts
with motion blur (not image motion blur, though), and still render in
reasonable time.
To save on memory, use triangular particles instead. PArray etc. have a
triangle primitive built in, but for PFlow you'd want to use Shape Instance, and
make sure you instance a single-faced object with no mapping coordinates,
as those mapping coordinates are redundant on tiny particles and just waste
RAM.
Probably the most important step in achieving the look you want is a partial
blur applied in post, which of course requires that you render your
particles out as a separate layer. If you have a compositing app like Combustion
or Digital Fusion, look around for tutorials on "specular bloom". If
you're
doing this all in Max, you can get great results by adding a Blur
render-effect, then under its Pixel Selections tab, increase the Brighten (a
lot)
and reduce the Blend (a lot).
If you're having trouble with the particles' motion, your new best friends
will be the Drag space-warp and the Wind space-warp's turbulence feature,
and/or Blur Studios' RandomWalk and BlurWind space-warps, which you can find
at http://www.maxplugins.de - and you may find the Displace warp's ability
to affect particles with 3D procedural textures kind of interesting, too.
If you've ever watched the terrible TV show Farscape (fart-gags and leather
fetishists in space), the methods described above were used for just about
all the 3D energy effects, from season 2 onwards.
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