particle system LOD?

Unity Engine
1

LOD only works with renderer, I don’t see any LOD for particle systems, you know, hiding particles that are too small in frame.

Any idea?

2

I know this is super old, but I’ve thought about this quite a bit, though I haven’t implemented anything yet.
My idea is to write a particle LOD script which would, essentially consist of two things:

  1. Two versions of the particle emitter (near and far)
  2. A handful of editable parameters such as a near distance, a far distance and a cull distance as well as an editable curve.

The idea is this, you would pass in the near and far emitters as input and set a near, far and cull distance. At runtime, the far emitter would simply be hidden (or even destroyed) and based on the camera’s distance to the emitter, it’s values would get interpolated between those of the near and far emitters by evaluating along the curve. Past the cull distance, it’s emission would be turned off.

What would be nice about this is that there would be no pop. Even at the cull distance, by turning off the emission rather than disabling the object, the remaining particles would simply die out naturally.

Some cool stuff would be possible with such a system, for instance…

Imagine a fire effect which produced many flame particles to fill out the flame. The far version of the effect could, instead produce at, say a quarter of the rate, but at twice the size so that as you got farther from the effect, less and less particles would spawn, but they would spawn bigger and bigger in order for the fire, as a whole, to retain the same volume.

Anywho, that’s what I’ve been thinking about. But, like I said, haven’t tried it yet, so this is all hypothetical.

3

You’re talking about a script that manages that on top of shuriken?
You could use distance to lerp the emission rate of the individual shuriken

4

Yes, that’s what I’m suggesting. Simply lerping the emission rate would be an OK solution, sure, but lerping based on a curve would give more control, and allowing you to affect more than just the emission rate would open up more possibilities like affecting particle alpha, size etc. over distance.