Camera stacking depth buffer & draw order

Hello,

I have a stacked camera, base camera rendering "deepspace" planets in a tiny scene ( planet is 1 unit, but really near the base camera so it appears huge) and the overlay camera rendering "everything else, spaceships, stations etc) on a normal scale. When not clearing the z-buffer the station is rendered behind the planet (as expected):


So we enable the z-buffer-clear for the overlay and the station appears nicely in front of the planet, as expected:


However the green particle effect (which is floating centered a bit above the station) still gets rendered behind the planet, and I don't understand why. I mean, the z-buffer was cleared and it is working fine for the station...?

So it seems to be related to the state of depth-texture on/off in the base camera, which when switching to "off" results in the green effect before the planet, as we want.


So somehow the particle-system is using the depth-texture when it's enabled, which I'd like to somehow disable. The depth-texture is needed for a different effect (which depends on it) so it should be enabled, but the green particlesystem (or all particle systems) should ignore the depth-texture.

I didn't see anything obvious in the particlesystem rendering options... Any ideas how to do this?

 

For anyone else running into this, using the framedebugger noticed the drawcall - as expected - is using the _CameraDepthTexture. Combined with information from another post figured out that soft particles require the _CameraDepthTexture and disabling that indeed gives the correct rendering order since then it doesn't use the "weird miniature" DepthBuffer from the deepspace camera.