Particles always appear on top or behind <- Not what I want

I’ve got spiral path that a particle system follows from top to bottom. There is a plane with an image of a tree (ie 2D sprite) in the middle, and the spiral flows down and around the tree trunk visual.

My problem is that particles generated behind the tree are still visible in front of it. Or, if I move the path back too far (positive Z), all the particles appear behind the tree (even though part of the path is in front of it).

I have the particles being generated in Wold space on billboards, so I don’t understand why those farther away from the (orthographic) camera than the tree are appearing in front of it.

I have the Sort Mode set to “by Distance” and Sorting Fudge at 0, but those refer to inter-particle rendering, not the rest of the world, right?

Any suggestions on how to fix this would be much appreciated!

Particle sorting is indeed related to just the particles relative to each other, yes.

There is a bug in unity with the scaling of objects that will cause your particles to appear ‘in front’ of geometry; heres a forum post about it. I ran into this same problem and recall that changing the scaling did fix the problem. Try playing with the scale to see if it will fix your problem, and if it doesn’t please post back here.

this shader strech my texture…