This is extremely unlikely to be a good technique (and it isn&#x27;t new) but here are two alternatives.  Even in the demo video, beneath the lens flares and other excess, the particles are aliasing like crazy.<p>First of all, particles like this are usually only a few pixels in size, so the shape doesn&#x27;t really matter as much as the area.  Because of this, I don&#x27;t think there is much gained, but there is a lot lost since it aliases so badly.<p>Renderman actually creates particles as two bilinear patches that make up the same shape as the intersection given by these two triangles.  You could do the same thing with a quad strip, which would still also take only 6 vertices.  The gpu will deal with the quads itself, possibly by creating two triangles for each quad.  This is very unlikely to be a performance hit since it does not affect shading.<p>A second way of creating a semi-transparent particle would be make a triangle strip that rotates around one center point.  The center point has an alpha of 1, the outer points have an alpha of 0.  The interpolation takes care of gradient transparency to the edges, and even with 5 outer vertices the shape + gradient should easily look good enough to hold up while taking up around 16 pixels.<p>Shadows - the best way in these situations to control shadows is usually to scale down the particle (or hair).  Remember that the shape or look on a micro scale doesn&#x27;t matter as much as the integral of the area * integral of the transparency.