Single-cell versus multi-cell emitter controls

If a particle system has only one cell, the Emitter Inspector displays both the emitter controls and the cell controls. In this case, you can control every aspect of the particle system from this single Inspector, which saves you from going back and forth between the Emitter and Particle Cell Inspectors.

If a particle system has two or more cells, the Emitter Inspector looks much different. The list of controls is much shorter, and the majority of the cell controls are replaced with a smaller group of master controls (hidden by default).

Changes made using the master controls modify the effect of each cell’s parameters relative to the other cells in the system. For example, in a particle system with three cells that have different Scale values, increasing the Scale parameter in the Emitter Inspector multiplies the Scale value of all three cells by the same percentage. This has the result of increasing or reducing the size of every particle in the system, while keeping the size of each particle relative to one another the same. For this reason, the master control values of multi-cell particle systems appear as percentages.