Particles and lights question

[fizzer21]

I've been trying to get a particle system to use lights for some time know with little joy, I have tried various things like including selecting the a light as the particle object, parenting a sphere to a light and using the sphere, grouping etc. Nothing was working and then I started playing around with the anything glows light and low and behold the particles started emitting light that would be cast on objects in the scene, unfortunatly my machine crashed, losing the file, and I don't seem able to replicate what I thought I had done.

Has any one been able to produce a particle system that emits lights of some kind?

Thanks in advance for any help on this.

[jbshorty]

if you do get this working, you may never see a final render as all those particle lights are going to be very costly in rendering time.

[Sardtok]

Ok,
to do this with AGlows.
Insert your particle system.
Insert an AGlows object, or give the particle system an AGlows modifier.
Set the light to the appropriate color or set it to the particle color or glow.
Then set the light to emit from facets or vertex, not bounding box.
It should work now, adjust the intensity of the light and all.
You might have to change the standoff and minimum distance, but it depends on the size really, it's there to avoid self-illumination.
You might also want to turn the fidelity down, but I think the default of 10 won't be that insanely slow. ;)

But as jbshorty said, this will most likely be a very slow render, but it really depends on the amount of particles, and whether the particles have a lot of facets or not.
If I were you, I would cheat instead.
Render a pass with just the particles in the light color in the glow channel.
Then render a pass with some omni lights placed at strategic positions inside the particle system, and turn off the particle systems visibility (if this is animation, make sure you animate these lights or it will look very weird).
Then in post, make one layer for each, make the particle layer additive, and place it on top of the ordinary render. You might want to gaussian blur the particle layer, to make them look sort of glowing.

A third option is turning on indirect lighting, and just giving the particles a color in the glow channel.
But indirect lighting can be really slow, possibly a lot slower than using AGlows, but I can't say for sure.