The Tips in detail

 "Particle systems can do more than just add rain or snow."

Look at the "Seafloor" image. The swarm right to the baracuda is a particle system with instanced geometries of a small fish. If you learn about the abilities of a particle system, you can save much time placing many identical geometries with several individual parameters per geometry, such as swarms or crowds or even forests and thelike. By using the animation offset values properly you can get the desired randomness into your swarms.

Particle Systems are prime candidate for certain special FX like fire, since you have a much greater level of control and the tweaks can be modified by adding spacewarps or environmental FX like gravity, wind and thelike what you can't do using ie. a combustion.

The problems you will encounter are: particles emitting light, material changes over time, physical simulations (aka: dynamics), face count to name, but a few.

• Particles emitting light is a thing Max (up to V2.5) can't do "out of the box". You will need Luma Objects (from Trinity Animation/Cebas Computer) for this task. Raising self illumination will not(!) emit any light to be caught (and reflected / refracted) by other objects. This just makes the material appear illuminated.
• Materials changing it's aspects over the time is important for most particle systems, since most substances change after being emitted. You will need to animate the materials and use the according parameters.
• Particles and Dynamics are discussed here.
• Particle Systems push up a scenes face count towards infinity. Particles have the following amount of faces:
  • Triangle 1 face
  • Special 6 faces
  • Constant 10 faces
  • SixPoint 2 faces
  • Cube 12 faces
  • Facing 2 faces
  • Tetra 4 faces
  • Sphere 80 faces

  Using instanced geometries you can easily exceed theese values. Metaparticles don't have a fixed amount of faces since they are calculated individually.

  Each particle has it's own amount of faces, so the total number of faces is: "number of faces per particle" times "particles visible". Theese faces are visible during the time the particle system is active but the number increases during the time the emitter needs to reach it's "maximum output" and decreases from the frame on where the emitter stops working until the frame the last particle dies.