Halo or Bright light effect with particles?

Is there a way to add a halo or brightness to your particle effects without a script? Or an easy way to add, I guess a light or something similar? My particle effects use alpha maps but seem to have this hard edge and when i use a soft option the entire texture looks washed out. I,m going for those bright glowing effects I see in games with hard alpha map designs that fade into bright halo style FX as the particle emmits, if that makes any sense? Like in attack stikes when a weapon makes contact.

Sorry for the late response but here in this photo you can see the difference of what I’m talking about between the two lightning bolts. After examining the pic I’m almost sure it’s the same lightning texture but one has this bright glow (halo effect) around it? The others were prob going take on the same glow but I snapped this shot with the video paused before emitter could finish the effect! Most of my textures for particles, etc resemble the lightning in the photo with no glow just hard edges? Thanks for any help or ideas!

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You can do this kind of things easily with post effects, but these are available in Pro only.

For simple Particles you could try an additive shader. Create the halo for your particle texture in Photoshop, add a blurred Alpha Channel and you should get something usable. (Note: additive shaders work best on a dark background)

This example uses additive shaders:

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This is the texture used for the laser.