Many thanks...although I thought I did try MR last nite, but couldn't see the particles...anyway I'll try again tonite. Anyway, I mapped a jpg image to NURBS plane and turned on Smooth Shading and Hardware Texturing ad the image came out ok (there was no errors). I don't know whether that has any relations to this issue of particle rendering. If Blender can do it, surely Maya can. I don't seem to be having any problem with Batch Render-ing an AVI as so many in the forums claimed.

Sigh...such a difficult job creating a "realistic science fiction space wars movie" in Maya (and Blender). Here's my work-in-progress :-

(1) Camera path animation / image plane / lighting - DONE

(2) Sound - DONE. Collected from freesoundproject.com

(3) Spaceships and space scenarios and animation - 50% done. One of the scene involves the snow blizzard

(4) Photorealistic (nearly!) potrait animations of conversations - 70%. Nearly there. Eyes are OK. Hair OK. Bumps and texturing OK. Except skin. I used Lambert and it's still a bit plasticky. I'm experimenting with misss_fast_skin now.

(4) Putting together the movie - NOT DONE. Without any dough, looks like I have no choice but to use Windows Movie Maker 2.1 to put a decent animation muxing the audios and the video AVIs generated from Maya and Blender. Dope Sheet and Blender Video Sequencer do not do muxing.

Hmm....I have to see where I go from here. Hollywood ? Check that.