Here is a test animation of a particle system emitting a smokey type of material.
http://mysite.reblended.com/bgdm/0001_0250.avi
It is encoded straight from Blender with MPEG-4 codec. 10 seconds long. 427 Kb in size.
I have used no lights in this and no IPO’s, etc. Just straight from blender render. I could improve it with lamps and IPO’s, but I don’t know how to use IPO’s worth a crap, so there ya go.
BgDM
The only problem is that your particles have a very easy to recognize material. In other words there’s a pattern in it thats hard not to see repeating over and over. If you made it more uniform and less “crazy”, it’d look more like smoke. Just my $.02
Thanks for the reply.
That is the key problem with Blenders particle system. It applies the halo as a sprite and it is not very controlable at all.
I have done a new test, that I will post tomorrow, with some different material settings that looks a lot better.
BTW, thanks to @ndy for posting his halo settings!
BgDM
Would it be possible to write a python script that changes the sprite rendered on each frame? Or something like that?
Well, I’m not surte about that, cause I am no coder or Python expert at all.
I know there is a function to control and animate the Z-offset, but I don’t know how to do that either. Sorry.
BgDM
Your post got me thinking about making smoke from particle systems…
I started an animation some time ago that required som things to burn, and I came up with this method for making the smoke from the flames:
It’s just a particle emitter with a cloud texture applied to give colour (with use of colourband) and also alpha.
Is this what you had in mind? If you want I can give you the .blend.
bob_dog: nice anim. I was going for more of a darker smoke effect. I am still trying to tweak the cloud texture to my lkiking with the colourband.
Particles can be a pain in the butt.
BgDM
I agree. I hate having to render an animation after every tweak to see if they are behaving correctly. Guess I’m just lazy. 
I agree. I hate having to render an animation after every tweak to see if they are behaving correctly. Guess I’m just lazy. ;)[/quote]
Ever hear of ALT+A?
Duh… no kidding. Ever heard of ALT-A doesn’t show you what the textures and alpha mapping will do, not to mention the IPO’s for the textures?