Particles Rendering Differently Depending / Points Visible in Instances

[azmilt]

I'm a particle newby and have a couple questions ...

1. I have some instanced particles. I render with Hardware 2.0, they look fine in the viewport. But, depending on the camera angle, I get different results. See attached images 1, 2 and 3. Image 2 is from the front and the brown particles look as expected. In images 1 and 3 from the side there's more at either end. The additional particles are "there" in the side renders at either end, but not from the front. So if the camera moves from a front-ish view to the side these additional particles pop up. The spray particles are legacy particles if it matters, the problematic ones are nParticles in a volume emitter. I'm stumped, any ideas?

2. I instanced some particles using tutorials. In more than one, once the expression for instancing of more than one object is done, they switch to "Points" and the instancing objects appear, without the points. When i do it the particles do instance, but I get the points as shown in Particleinstancing-dots.jpg. I don't understand why the tutorials I follow don't have the dots but I do.

I hope these questions make sense. I'm using Maya 2016.

Thanks