Dali Renderer is able to render spherical particles directly without converting them to triangular geometry. Particles are always volumetric (spheres) and can be of any material. A ray passing through a particle will have two intersections. Accordingly, for a dielectric particle, the correct reflections and refractions will be calculated.
Particles can have different diameters and UVW coordinates. Particle coordinates can be animated within a frame, like vertices in mesh geometry.
Particle sources are some built-in 3DS MAX objects (SuperSpray, Blizzard, PArray, PCloud, Spray, Snow) or third-party plugins (PhoenixFD, tyFlow).
Each particle has two sets of texture coordinates:
UVW0 provided by the particle source;
UVW1, defines the coordinates of the intersection of the ray with the projection of the sphere onto the plane perpendicular to the ray. Can be used to "blur" the edges of a particle.
