Particle Emitter - Correct Depth Writes?!

Unity Engine
1

Hi,

another problem I need to solve…
If you look at the Detonator framework for example, ParticleEmitter seem to use camera oriented billboards to blend particles. That’s nice with very small particles but if you use some bigger chunks like in the Detonator framework, then these particles “disappear” in walls if you don’t look straight at them…

So my question is, has anyone solved this yet?

My idea is to adjust the particle planes to correctly resemble the camera billboard projection but instead project them back to the XY-plane which means that all particles will have the same depth value as the particle emitter. This would visually yield to the same results in an empty scene but correctly let walls blend in front of emitters and also hide walls behind it.

This is probably a non-trivial task which might well consume some time, so I wonder if anyone has done that?

Usually this is not really what Particle Emitters are expected to do but you don’t want an explosion or smoke to go “through” walls… It’s not just wrong it also look impressively ugly…

Any thoughts on this?

regards
Burns

2

Hmm seems like forcing SoftParticles would at least solve the problem of these strange “plane” like disappearence in a wall but still there is the problem that explosions go through walls :frowning:

Would Umbra Occlusion perhaps do the trick here? Because if the emitter is behind a wall it should be considered occluded even though its planes are visible? I can’t test this right now…