Extended Practice: Research

I found this video on YouTube explaining how to use nParticles are emit them from a character to create the effect of the character disintegrating away. It explains how the character disappears int he scene and how you can make the particles follow the action of the character. You do this by emitting particles from the character and then going in to the attributes and tweak the particle settings to move with the character and then key frame the emittion rate to start and stop for the amount of time that you would like. After you finish with the tweaking its time to make the character disappear, doing this is easy, all you do is key frame the visibility to when you want the character to disappear, that it simple.    

This also shows me how I would change the look, shape and texture of the particles by creating one main object and linking that object to the particles so the particles imitate the main object.