nparticles tweaking and optimizing
 

Hello guys, I'm new in this board. Been looking for maya-specific forum quite sometime since I'm going to have my hands dirty on maya.

I've been researching Maya's nParticles for about couple of weeks now. It's quite powerful, but some questions :

1. is there any way to increase/decrease the particle number and still having the parameters intact? So far been searching everywhere on this and no luck at all.

2. Is the substeps in nParticles work just like Realflow's substeps calculations? What I found is that there's kind of only minor speed increase in the calculation process.

3. Is there any event driven parameters I could use for nParticles besides the collision event. Just for example maybe events based on particles' age or velocity.

Like when a particle hit the age 20 or so it'll split or the gravity influence will not affect it anymore. I could do this in max using particle flow (altho it isn't really physical simulation), but even on maya's regular particle I couldn't find such facility.