Anyone have any idea how to have these particles conform to the surface of the sphere? Like stickers applied to a ball.

I'm not an FX guy, but my first guess would be to use a cloth sim, with the sphere as a deflector.

in blender this funktion is called shrinkwrap
iam not too familiar with max, but maybe there is some retopo modifier or something like that

take all of the post its at once and put a "spherify" modifier on it...
if they then go into the sphere then use the push modifier to make it a little bigger afterwards.

Are you trying to spawn particles on the surface of the sphere mesh?
Allen McKay has a series of legacy tutorials that covers that.

OR
Do you just want to smash the particles to the surface?
Use the conform compound shape. (F1 search, conform)

OR
Do you want both?
You might need to conform the shape, create a morph target, animate the morph from 100 (completely conformed) to 0, then toggle off the visibly of the morph and turn on the particles in the same frame, should be seamless.

I'm trying to spawn particles on the surface. As far as I can tell the conform compound isn't compatible with Pflow. Also the sphere is just an example in the end it'll be a much more complex surface.

Are these particles leaving the surface or animating in some way? If they're perminetly stuck to the surface I don't understand why you need PFlow. You can't warp or conform particles to the surface of an object, using vanilla PFlow. You can only use the surface of a mesh as starting point for particles to spawn. If you're particle is a box, its going to be a box placed on the surface of whatever mesh and never conform to the surface.

You could... use a "Birth Texture Operator" to spawn particles in specific places. You would start with animated texture map, as the particle spawns the sticker disappears.

Or you can do the morpher method I mentioned earlier.

Hey yeah sorry, the particles will be peeling from the surface and blowing away. I guess I'll have to look at some ways to trick my way around it. Cheers.

You might want to look using cloth and wind. If you conform the stickers to the surface, and convert them to cloth and blowing them away with wind. You'll probably get a nice peeling effect as the stickers bend, fold and slide over the surface, which they won't do as particles, they'll be rigid meshes. If you adjust the timing of the simulations they'll flake off at different times.

I know this is sort of an older post, but i figured if it hasn't been resolved i think i can help. An easy way to get the particles to conform to the shape of the sphere is to use PFlow, replace the position icon node with the position object node then change its settings to surface in the position object parameters. You also may want to drop the time of the particle start & end to Z3R0, that way the particles are always there no matter how you move the time slider. To disburse the sphere, just add an age test to the last event, giving it a frame time to start, create a new event with find target and move the find target object outside of the screen or camera view. All the particles that made up the sphere will find the find target object at whatever frame you chose it to. Of course you can play with the speed and the way the particles travel between the sphere ant its target to refine it. This is only the case in 3DS Max that i know. I hope i helped.