The sweepAttack particles won't render when the player is in third person view (the view that you can see the face, press F5 2 times). In the screenshot, the particles were made by powered repeating command blocks with
/particle sweepAttack ~ ~5 ~ 5 5 5 1 10
in it.
Environment
MacBook Pro (Retina 13-inch、Early 2015) OS X El Capitan 10.11.5 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 16 GB 1867 MHz DDR3 Intel Iris Graphics 6100 1536 MB
Depends on angle. See mine https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-88120