Can you render particles?

I can render particles when I nominate an object, (or group) in the render section that had a material, (even then though it seemed that said objects retained their original lighting pattern necessitating the use of an emitter material). However it would be nice to be able to render the straight forward particles that you can see so easily in solid mode. Is there some way of adding a material to them? If not, I'm not sure I see the point of them if they can't be rendered. Unless their function is just to quickly show you what you might get if you swap halos etc for objects later on. Is that the idea?

  • Jonathan Lampel replied

    Unless their function is just to quickly show you what you might get if you swap halos etc for objects later on. Is that the idea?

    Yeah, pretty much. They can be rendered directly as halos in Blender Render, but there's no support for halos in Cycles so it's easiest to just render them as objects. 

  • Jim Coote(jimcoote) replied

    OK Tx. Never thought about trying Blender Render as I've just got used to using Cycles as a default. Not a problem if particles can't be rendered except as objects. Just wanted to be sure I wasn't missing out on anything obvious. Case closed.