Both. They have their own presets, which you can tweak, you can make your own off those presets by changing the behavior via sliders, or you can actually script new ones entirely. They licensed something called Popcorn FX http://www.popcornfx.com/ so their method for creating particle behavior is what can be used in…
Handling a whole new up axis is not an easy task and would require a lot of changes in our engine, I doubt we would support a change like that. Are you exporting in the obj format ? You could rotate the mesh by yourself before exporting (even scripting it). Also, If you use the FBX file format instead it should handle the…