[5.5/5.6 beta Particle] Mesh emitter with mesh render mode

Unity Engine
1

@richardkettlewell and @karl_jones
One thing about the emitter shape I really am not sure if you guys treat it as a bug or not because there is a similar bug in 5.5 and maybe older versions which associates with the scale of the shape source.
Here is the setup of my particle system object with the following key changes from the default settings:

  • mesh emitter shape (either cube or sphere), emitted from “triangle” and “align to direction” enabled.
  • mesh render mode which loads a quad.
  • material = default-diffuse

Demo GIF: http://gph.is/2i0lVEK

My problem is that x and y axes of the quad particles seem reversed (if I create a fresh plane from Blender and import it directly to Unity without any rotation or plugin, it would appear the z axis reversed instead.) I expect “align to direction” to align the local direction of the mesh particle with the normal of the emitter mesh, but right now it seems that it’s doing the opposite for certain axes…

2

Hi,

Align to Direction isn’t supported for Mesh particles.

We may try to support it in a future version, or tidy up the UI to prevent you from trying to use it and getting weird results.

(logged: Unity Issue Tracker - Particles Align To Direction doesn't align particles properly when Render Mode is set to Mesh)

1 Like
3

Is there any performance issue even though I can achieve the intended result by setting negative transform.scale value? TBH I find it pointless to use “align to direction” on normal billboard particles which can be done better with stretched billboard…

4

No, no performance issue.

Align to direction is a different feature to stretched billboards. You can add a start rotation onto it, for example. Plus they become non-camera-facing. But whatever suits your needs :slight_smile: