problem I still can't solve
 

ok this one I actually thought about for a long time before I decided to post but heres the problem

every time I follow the missile trail tutorial from highend3d I get the last couple particles to glow for no reason. no where on my rgb ramp does it go bright on its end and the opacity ramp is completely dark in its end. I think this would apply mostly to the ones who've encountered the same problem in the past. any ideas what I'm doing wrong and how you fixed it? i've been trying to figure this out for the past couple weeks.

http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/2...ailprobds5.jpg

That doesnt look like an issue with your ramp. more like an issue with the way the particles are ending. Check the settings you have used and ensure that you are getting them to end correctly. best tocheck the way they are working without render, watch the trail and see if it is spawning more particles as the die.

cant offer much more than that tbh. Sorry...

looks to me like cloud particles.

maybe the prob lies in the software render. try the following: create a particle sample info node and pipe it into the transparency/and maybe the other one "opacity" i think, of the cloud shader. try it out...

thanks for the help
I've looked at the nonrendered particles and they look fine when I start at 1. But I noticed when I start it at frame 120 they start creating themselves somewhere down the line randomly and looked similar to the render I posted. so since I'm rendering frames 120 to 300 instead of 1 to 300, I'm assuming my renderer is looking at the particles then instead of starting from 1. if that's the case, I guess my only solution is to render from 1 to 300.

As particles are dynamics they are calculated on a per frame basis, jumping to frame 120 might be messing up the calcualtion.

Try cashing the particles and then rendering form frame 120, as i'm guessing that mayas attempting to calculate them based off 120 as the start, not knowing whats happened before (even though nothing has) due to it wanting the calcs to start off at frame 1, caching them from frame 1 to 300 stores the data so it just references the positions of the particles from the cache with no calcs and should stop the strange ones appearing from the clacs on the fly.

thanks gster123 the caching seems like a really good idea. I'm gonna give it a go and see if it fixed it.