Particle system rendered behind near meshes

Unity Engine
1

Hi i have a small problem with my particle system. I use it to create the flame for my candles, but when i hit play the flame is rendered behind near other meshes. However in the scene view the particle system is rendered correctly.

Scene view:

Game view:

I found several other threads describing simmilar problems, but they all have zero answeres.
I hope somebody can help me to resolve this problem, its really annoying.

2

Is your candle being rendered using a Transparent shader/material, perhaps?

The Frame Debugger in the Editor ought to be able to let you dissect what is happening here.

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3

To clarify a few things.

  1. it looks like all the candle flames are rendering behind the objects and not just the one highlighted. Can you verify that is correct? Or is just just a separate artifact.


  1. as you were able to provide both a functional image and a broken one, what is the difference on where they are rendered? It looks like the working is the scene view, and the broken is the game view. Is that correct, or is there something else?

I did a quick search, and came across someone else running into a similar issue, but with a fix Particles behind meshes? There appears to be a bug when the particle system scale is set to (1,1,1) on order. and any other scale, 1.00001 for each works.

Additionally, it seems unchecking receive shadow on the particles would work. Haven’t tried it, just what I’ve found.

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4

Thank you for your help!

@richardkettlewell
For the flame i use the standard unity additive particle shader.
I didn’t know that something like the frame debugger existed.

@DanVioletSagmiller1
It’s the same for all candles and it works only in the scene view.
Sadly the two fixes you found did not work for me :frowning:

Going throu the rendering of the frame step by step I noticed, that in fact the flame is rendered infront of the mesh, but it is barely seeable.

When I change the contrast and the brightness of the image you can easily see that in one of the render steps the flame is added.

The problem is that i don’t know what to do with this information :face_with_spiral_eyes:

5

That post/bug is from 2011… I doubt it’s still a problem today.

6

Maybe tweak the candle texture so that it is “whiter”. Additive can only add to the background pixel color, eg if you add blue to blue, result is still blue. Increase the values in the green/red channels and it may show up better. Or try the Alpha Blend shader instead with some bloom :slight_smile:

7

Oh and it was the candlestick I was asking about really - make sure it uses an opaque material.

8

Thanks for all the tips.
Sadly 'm a little bit short on time right now and it’s not a big problem.
So I will try to fix this at the end of our project if there’s enough time left ^^.

9

Turn off the Soft Particles option in the Quality settings. The basic particle shaders with Soft Particles turned on don’t handle small effects well.

If you upgrade your project to 2017.3 or download and use the new Standard Particle Shader it has more fine control over the soft particle fade distance. The problem is the older effects have the soft particle fade factor clamped to 3.0, which translates to a fade distance of 0.33 units. If your object is smaller than that, like most objects will be when building with 1 unit == 1 meter, that fade distance means the effect will appear to disappear or appear behind things it shouldn’t.

3 Likes
10

Great idea, that is almost certainly the problem here.

11

What about updating all basic particles shaders to fix the soft particle issue?

12

Oh yes! That did the trick. Thank you!
I’ll definitely upgrade my unity version as soon as this project is finished :smile:

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