Hi all,
Like I said in my previous thread, I’m a new blender user who’s currently evaluating it to see how well suited the program is for an upcoming short film I’m working on. So far, the results are insanely good. Blender rocks, overall!
My question here is about billboard particles. When I last tried them a couple of months ago, they seemed to fall just short of greatness.
In Maya, billboards are called spites and they have been a production staple for years to produce effects like smoke, pixie dust, clouds, motion trails, etc. They also have the additional benefit of rendering almost in realtime.
In Blender, Billboards seem to be gimped by lacking a few key features. It’s possible, however, that I’m simply missing the solution that’s right in front of me. At least, I hope so. 
It’s been a while since I tried them, so I will simply fire out a list of questions, some of which are to just refresh my memory.
Can blender billboards use avi/quicktime movies with alpha channel?
Can these quicktimes’ starting frames be randomly offset?
Can billboards be assign random vales at creation-time for scale, speed, rotation, color gain, etc?
The BIGGEST issue (for me): Can I control opacity of each billboard over time? Can I fade a billboard in at the start of it’s lifespan and fade it out at the end? I know you can do that for many of the particle types, but I dont think you can do it with billboards. I hope I’m wrong. 
Can billboard colors be influenced by a color ramp over time?
If any of these areas are deficient, are they on the the roadmap to be implemented?
Sprites/billboards are a HUGELY powerful particle tool, just so long as they are implemented fully. Overall the particle tools look awesome! It just needs a little extra push to make it truly great!
Thanks!