I've seen this exact effect done using a 2d fluid in maya. It's fairly simple and renders pretty quickly. You can play with the tutorials at Alias or I think there are some fluid tutorials online....

I'm truly tired of winter!

You could also do this with a hardware render setup, multistreaks, color maped over life, turn down the transparency and turn on the color accum. Take it into comp package of your choice, do a few...

You can't animate the opacityPP of an instanced obj, you are "instancing " a single object. A work around is to create several duplicates of your original obj, replace the texture on each of them...

In your comp package just use a luma key. I'm not sure why the particles aren't rendering with an alpha, but from the pic above I think you can easily get away with a lumanance key, or changing your...

You'll also need to colour correct, possably blur (depth), add shadows, make sure highlights are in the correct places ( same as in plate), match the films grain, etc... Basically you need to fit...

As a total newbie, I'd also be interested in some particle specific tut's. Explosions, fire, water, anything dynamics related. I've been looking around on th web for a little while now, and have met...