It's using the Ward BSDF currently, which has some energy loss so might be a bit
dark. More/better BSDF options can be implemented later.
Patch by Mike Farnsworth, some modifications by me. Currently it's not possible yet
to set a custom tangent, that will follow as part of per-bsdf normals patch.
* Location: Basically the same as the location from Object Info node for object instances on particles, but in principle there could be additional offsets for dupli objects, so included for completeness.
* Size: Single float scale of the particle. Also directly translates to object scale for current dupli objects, but handy to have as a single float to start with instead of a scale vector (currently not even exposed in Object Info).
* Rotation: This is a quaternion, which are not yet supported by Cycles nodes. The float4 is copied to internal Cycles data and stored in the particles texture data, but the node doesn't have a socket for it yet and the data is not yet written to the stack. Code is just commented out so could be enabled quickly if/when rotation support is added to cycles.
* Velocity: Linear velocity vector of particles.
* Angular Velocity: Angular velocity around principle axes.
The texture data is currently packed tightly into the particles texture, which saves a few bytes, but requires an additional texture lookup for some vector attributes which spread over two float4s. Could also add another float4 to particle size to avoid this.
The particle data is stored in a separate texture if any of the dupli objects uses particle info nodes in shaders. To map dupli objects onto particles the store an additional particle_index value, which is different from the simple dupli object index (only visible particles, also works for particle dupli groups mode).
Some simple use cases on the code.blender.org blog:
http://code.blender.org/index.php/2012/05/particle-info-node/
pass index, and a random number unique to the instance of the object.
This can be useful to give some variation to a single material assigned to
multiple instances, either manually controlled through the object index, based
on the object location, or randomized for each instance.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Nodes/More#Object_Info
