Particle system not rendering on second camera during play mode until I switch to Scene View

The setup:

  • Camera with a target render texture that is pointed at a particle system.
  • RawImage in my UI canvas displays the render texture with UI/default shader.

-The camera and the particle system gameObjects start disabled until I want the effect to occur. – - When a button is pressed, I enable both gameObjects, and trigger play on the particle system.

The result:

  • I enter play mode and trigger my particle system to play, but I don’t see anything in the game view.
  • I toggle to the scene view, and I can see the 3d particles, and I can see the 2d projection of those particles onto the ui canvas
  • I switch back to game view, and for some reason it’s rendering perfectly there, too.

This is consistent behavior, I can’t get it to display properly in the game view unless I toggle to scene view and back.

Any clue what’s happening?

Update: In order to get it to work, it’s not enough to just toggle to scene view. I actually need to direct the scene view camera to look at the particles before they will render on the canvas (in scene view or game view)

This seems like very strange behavior, and I can’t imagine what would cause it.

Solve it!

It wasn’t the render texture’s fault after all. Particle systems have a culling mode which was set to “Pause and Catch Up”. Not sure why it was being culled when i had a camera pointing at it, nor why the scene view camera of all things was what needed to wake it up, but turning this to “always simulate” worked.

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