"Im far from shrek gfx but it did make some effects alot lively :) ill be working more on this."
Here's another trick.
Make a texture map which is a gradient that is bright in the center, and completely black at the edges.
Next, add a second surface to your particle sphere, and add a second sphere to that surface, which is 1.25x as large as your first sphere.
Set this second surface to add blend mode.
Load your texture as a spherical environment map, and apply it to the second sphere.
Voila, you now have a solid glowing sphere particle.
This would be perfect for creating a fire effect very similar to the one in Shrek.
You can also probably get away with making the outer sphere pretty low polygon, though if you go too low it might introduce distortions in the blur, but if you have a bunch of them together you wouldn't notice this.
"polys are NOT sorted for you"
That just means within the object itself. Not with regards to each object being sorted with other objects in the rest of the scene, and it does not refer to zbuffering.
Here's another trick.
Make a texture map which is a gradient that is bright in the center, and completely black at the edges.
Next, add a second surface to your particle sphere, and add a second sphere to that surface, which is 1.25x as large as your first sphere.
Set this second surface to add blend mode.
Load your texture as a spherical environment map, and apply it to the second sphere.
Voila, you now have a solid glowing sphere particle.
This would be perfect for creating a fire effect very similar to the one in Shrek.
You can also probably get away with making the outer sphere pretty low polygon, though if you go too low it might introduce distortions in the blur, but if you have a bunch of them together you wouldn't notice this.
"polys are NOT sorted for you"
That just means within the object itself. Not with regards to each object being sorted with other objects in the rest of the scene, and it does not refer to zbuffering.