I see Blender 2.76 now has a feature called "Point Density" textures. Is this a particle system? If so, how is it different from previous particle systems?
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3related: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/45481/halo-particles-dont-render-in-cycles – Feb 11 '16 at 14:58
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Point Density Textures are a way of rendering particles or mesh vertices as volumetric halos in Cycles.
A halo is basically a little volumetric ball. You can accomplish essentially the same effect without point clouds by using dupliverts or a particle system with little spheres as particles. However point density textures are much more efficient due to requiring a much simpler BVH, since the entire volume is within one object, instead of hundreds of thousands of little overlapping objects.
The above example uses a particle system with 250,000 particles and a turbulence force field. To render it as a point cloud I created a "domain" object (a scaled cube) around the particle system and gave it a volumetric emission shader using the Density from the Point Density as the emission strength. See this answer for how to set up a point density texture.
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Basically, it is a way of using particles or a mesh's vertices to drive the density of a volumetric material. You will need to use a Point Density texture and set the emitter object/mesh.
J Sargent
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