Okay -but in order for sprites to be of any use in an particle you need two controls: transparency over particle life and glow over particle life. You can't manage that within the vanilla C4D material manager.
A shader is provided which will let you vary any material parameter over particle life (and other particle variables in fact) AS LONG AS there is a link field for a shader in the material channel. So you can vary color, alpha, transparency, etc. over particle life but not glow because there's no shader link in the glow channel.
Fair enough - but there still needs to be better explanations relative to the whole Controller-Question-Action construct because I did find myself getting lost in the video when you started to add more than one question.
Yes, I agree but it's really difficult to explain without your being able to use the system. We'll do some more vids and the docs will I hope be fairly comprehensive.
Maybe it was just me, but I can imagine that complex set-ups with multiple controllers and questions would be difficult to go back to and understand a few days/weeks after you set-up the initial scene.
You really do need to name the various objects as you go along so you know what they do, I know from my own use that if you don't it can be difficult to sort out what they all do. If you do that it's much easier but I know we all forget to do it in when developing a scene!
Also, can a controller exist independently of an action? Or can multiple actions be placed under a single controller?
The workflow we were aiming for is that you can use the same questions and actions on mulitple emitters. If you have more than one emitter in the scene you don't want to have to duplicate the question objects for each emitter, unless the questions are different, of course. Likewise, we wanted the same actions to be reusable on multiple questions. The system currently is very flexible in allowing this. To answer your question, a controller is really a glorified null object. The reason for its existence is that multiple actions can be placed under one controller, which is then linked to a question. So if you want one queston to carry out 10 actions at once, you can do that with one controller. And that controller can be reused for more than one question.