Is there a way to turn off self-shadowing on particles?
I have alpha lit particles that I don’t want to look dark if the direction light is coming from behind the particles, only want them to be dark if they are in the shadow of objects.
I might be misunderstanding the question, but you can disable shadow casting from the particles themselves in the particle system renderer settings - Imgur: The magic of the Internet
If they are billboards, maybe changing the Normal Direction in the Renderer module may help.
To explain it better:
this is looking at the particles and it looks great… but when I view it from behind all the particles are black (I want the sunlight to pass through it so that it looks the same as the front)
The other view:
Then you should add ambient light of some kind or adjust the shader so it is not necessary. Does the same happen if you add a regular mesh sphere? if so then you need to address it in the same way or modify the shader to your liking / use other shader.
Adjusting the Normal Direction setting will definitely help wrap the lighting around the back of the billboards a bit more.
But really you are probably wanting some sort of translucency/sub-surface scattering. HDRP has that but maybe not URP. I’m not sure.
Hippocoder is right about needing a custom shader (graph) to try and do this. Ambient is a good cheap alternative.
Yep I just wanted to demystify what shader they might’ve been using - could be alpha cutout - I can’t see, and I don’t truly know their intention.