Feedback Wanted: Visual Effect Graph

I am trying really hard, but how can I make a particle points towards the velocity direction along only one axis? Without using "Along Velocity" because it changes all axis

 

20 pages and counting. How's that work on a dedicated VFX Graph forum coming along?

Gee. It must be a complex task. Not anything like "log in as admin and click create subforum" like most forum software.

No siree... Can't be as simple as that or someone would have done it by now...

 

Hi all , is VFX Graph supported with the 2D Renderer in URP ? 2019.3.0f3. I understand that it should work with URP and the 2D renderer is a customization of it so I would expect it to work.

All my effects are invisible with the 2D renderer . I would like to utilize the 2D lights and VFX in my game.

If I set the add a forward renderer and set it as default the VFX works but 2D lights dont and vice versa

 

Hey all, I am working with 2019.2.2 and 6.9.1 version of visual effect graph and LWRP.

I had an issue where some of my vfx files were not working. The ones that wouldn't work in the scene would show up in the Inspector preview window just fine but as soon as I exited the editor it would throw an error "Exception while compiling expression graph: System.NotImplementedException: UnityEditor.VFX.VFXExpressionInverseMatrix" and would stop working in the preview and scene. If I re-opened the editor it was fine in preview again.

I uninstalled and re-installed the visual effect graph and now none of my vfx files work in the scene or inspector. I tried uninstalling and re-installing visual effect graph and LWRP several times and it doesn't seem to help at all. I have reverted my project back to my last commit but it doesn't seem to change anything.

anyone have any suggestions/recommendations/ideas before I just re-create all of my effects in the standard particle system.

 

I was wondering about that option yesterday. What does "Edition mode" mean?

 

That did the trick. I will post a bug as soon as I get a chance. Thanks JulienF_Unity

 

Is there a method for enabling lit quads to cast shadows onto the world? Am I missing something?
Thanks!

 

NVM, I forgot you had to click on the context and then the inspector. I'm used to just looking at the graph itself.

 

This is great, and I enjoy using it. However, I am unable to get lit outputs working. Any time I even add the node, it spits out errors and stops displaying the particles. It seems others have similar issues, but with no resolve. I have tried updating the HDRP and graph packages. No luck on anything.

https://pastebin.com/TARJDt2N

 

Hi, I'm searching a way to stop a particle when it hits a collider, to generate dust/snow effect. There is some way to implement this? The portal example uses a simply Y value check but if terrain is not flat this won't work well. Any tips? thanks.

 

Quick off the cuff thought - die on collision and spawn a new particle with a velocity of zero?

 

I didn't find a block to detect collision only different Collider blocks, this is why I asked.

 

I have Unity 2019.1.8f1, but:

What's can be wrong?

 

Hard to say because you've given us hardly any information!

What platform have you got selected in Build Settings?

 

I'm using Visual Effect Graph to draw points (Output Particle Cube) from a volumetric video sequence. I'm going to be creating some more special effects later, but right now I'm just using it for straightforward playback where in the legacy pipeline I used Graphics.DrawMeshInstancedIndirect to draw meshes at each point contained in each frame. The volumetric sequence is 30fps so I figured I could set particle lifetimes to .03333333, but in practice that left me with some flickering where particles died before the next frame spawned. A lifetime of .05 seems like a decent compromise... sometimes it is detectable that two overlapping frames are drawing at the same time though.

Most of the work I do with volumetric video is Timeline-driven and I make as much stuff as I can work without entering play mode to speed up my workflow, but with the current setup, my volumetric video can only draw when the timeline is playing and creating new frames... if its paused, the particles just die right away.

Anyway, what I'd really like to be able to do is use an Event to kill all the particles in the system right before I add the particles in the next frame. Then I wouldn't have to bother worrying about lifetimes, etc.

As far as I can tell, Events can only be used right now to spawn new particles. Any plans to allow an event to force the Update Particle section to run? That way, I could have a Kill block where the bounding box is 0,0,0 size until I need to kill off all the particles, make it huge, kill the particles, then send the next frame.

Or am I thinking about this the wrong way? Any other suggestions for how to accomplish this?

 

Figured out a way! Added an int property "CurrentGroup" that gets flipped back and forth between 0 and 1 every time the Spawn event gets fired from my script. Assigning it to the Alpha attribute because I don't think I'll need it.

Then in the Update section, I do a simple Compare of the particle's Alpha attribute with the CurrentGroup property. If they aren't equal, particle is set to not alive! Cool!

 

Platform: PC, Mac & Linux Standalone.
OS: Windows 10 x64.
GPU: Geforce 8800GT, Driver 342.01
DirectX 12.

What's more?

So. Geforce 8800GT don't support DirectX 11/12 and Visual Effects Grath? That's problem?

 

Another suggestion - create all the particles you need in frame 0 and keep them alive. Just set their position each frame.

(this might limit some effects you might want to do in future but you can probably have the best of both worlds by spawning fx particles from each "pixel" particle)

 

I'm trying to do a thing where the particle position gets transformed into another Transform's local space where some calculations are performed to effect its visual output. However, I'm a bit confused by how an exposed Transform property is handled with the VFX Graph.

I was expecting to find a slot for a Transform in the inspector, but instead its broken out to the three separate components (TRS). Ok so I have to write a script to pass in the values? No obvious way to even know what the property names to assign the Vector3's to. I had to put the inspector in Debug mode and crawl through the property sheet to find the names ( TransformPropertyName_position, TransformPropertyName_angles, TransformPropertyName_scale).

Ok... I'm assigning the values successfully now. I can see them change in the inspector. So far so good-ish.

Now I pass the particle position attribute and my transform property into a Transform (Position) node and I take the output y position and visualize it with something like this (goes to attribute color):

What I get is not what I expect. The black to white gradient moves in the opposite direction I expect it to when I move the linked Transform up and down in my scene. When I rotate the Transform, it also behaves unexpectedly as if the pivot point is somewhere else? Kind of hard to tell. Anyways, this all seems pretty straightforward, but the wonky way that I had to go about getting the information from a Transform into the VFX graph has me thinking that maybe Transform-related nodes might not work how I expect or something is just off here.

Any thoughts?

 

Lol ok... minutes later, I figured it out... inverted the transform first and now it works as expected!

 

How to disable Play On Awake?
Every time I disable camera and reenable it, particles start playing. How to avoid this behavior? I want to enable/disable particles from the code.

 

@iamarugin,
Have you considered just enabling/disabling the GameObject your Visual Effect script is applied to? I've used it that way, not sure if it's correct but then again, there's not that much documentation.

 

I can send events to VFX. OK. But how can I do opposite? Say, play audio when effect start burst? I mean periodic burst, it is not I just can play sound on start.

 

What triggers the burst?

 

andybak what do you mean? Just a periodic burst with random delay.

 

Hei! I was wondering how to debug a variable from the Visual Effect Graph.
I'm looking what's inside the Attribute particleId, since I need this variable to access at a specific particle within the system.

Thanks

 

I played around with having a "Debug Output Block" which is basically just set up with a flipbook texture containing the numbers 0 - 99.

 

That's exactly what I was asking.

So - you've got a random delay and the random value is generated inside the particle system, right?

But you can't trigger stuff in C# because (currently) you can't get values out of a particle system.

So - instead of generating the random value inside the particle system, generate it in C# and feed it into the particle system. This is easy and obviously getting this event to trigger a C# script is also easy.

 

Thanks for the reply.

So do you use this block as debug? And then creating a 10x10 texture?

 

Yep. You could probably also do it via just the digits 0-9 and some blocks to work out the right placement.

A bit more crazy would be to generate the characters directly via https://github.com/IxxyXR/Text-VFX

 

Is the VFX graph compatible with custom SRPs yet?

 

I am trying to generate particles from what camera sees. The idea is to spawn particles from objects based on their depth. or just at the areas from whatever is in front.

I tried creating a simple render texture from camera ( the silhouette) and feeding in position map but that didnt work. any examples or how would you go about it?

 

The "orient" block for "Output ParticleStrip Quad" nodes seems broken. No matter how I change the Orient settings, the strip quads will always face towards the camera.


I'm trying to create some nice wide trail effects. Imagine a tire track going along the ground, a corkscrewing ribbon in the air, or a glowy arc behind a lightsaber. From a top-down view, this looks fine:

But from a side view, it looks pretty crappy. You can see the parts where the trail twists around awkwardly, and you can even see jagged edges clipping through the ground.


I'm on Unity 2019.3, VFX graph 7.1.7, default render pipeline. The screenshots are taken from the example project that I've attached.

Is this a known issue, and is there a workaround or plans to support this feature soon? I tried accomplishing a similar thing with Shuriken particle trails, but it just wasn't flexible enough for everything I want to do. Right now, I'm gonna have to go back to the good old LineRenderer, which works fine but obviously won't let me render bazillions of trails at once.

 

Hi.
Any tips on how to use a Depth Buffer based collision, please?
I have a camera with a almost top view and I just want falling particles to stop on the surface.

I use URP and noticed the option to use main camera in collision, which is, well, convenient. So it's just ignore everything in scene at any angle and settings setup I choose.
But VFX clearly got it's link to main camera and uses its parameters - when I change camera clipping planes settings it's clamped properly, but particles falling trough anything anyway.
At the same time in shader graph effects with depth work absolutely fine. Differend types of VFX collissions works fine too.

Also, running on Unity 2020.1a20, VFX graph and URP versions both 7.1.8. Windows 10 64bit, nVidia GTX 750.

 

Thanks, I managed to get this to work. The toggle is called "Use Custom Z Axis" if anyone else is searching for it. I wish the toggle was more obvious. I feel like it should automatically override the default strip behavior if the user adds the Orient block.

I played around with some of the different Orient settings, and most of them felt quite squirrelly and had strange visual artifacts at certain camera angles. Orient: Advanced worked quite well, though. I was able to get a nice flat strip with these settings. I'm using this on a Spawn Over Distance strip, to get a sort of tire-tracks effect.

 

Hi Any context on how to generate RenderTexture for position in vfx graph containing depth of the objects the camera is seeing..?

 

Is it possible to make particle change color based on distance from the main camera?

 

To the VFX gods who inhabit this forum, I need your help.

(Just an FYI, I'm a total newb, so please keep that in mind when responding so we can limit the back and forth.)

Keijiro posted a repo a few weeks back (https://github.com/keijiro/ProcCharVfx), and I'm trying to recreate a vfx setup he had.

Here is video of the desired effect:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9a5j7r5e79g0sb7/example.mov?dl=0
(you can also see the vfx graph and shadergraph vfx asset used below.)

I am looking to emulate this effect but instead of outputting procedural characters, I'd like the output to be text (TMP 3D text preferred). The idea is to feed the graph words, one character at a time, so I'm getting the typing effect with the visual eye candy as the output. An approach to consider, at least from what I've gathered through research, would be to select the proper character from the TextMeshPro Font Atlas and pass the geometry to the shader graph vfx asset, then use position coordinates to pass to the vfx graph. Seems feasible? I've tried to implement this myself, but haven't been able to make progress. If I'm totally off, please point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advanced

 

isn't that stuff normally at the shader level ? it'd create 10000 frame flipbook... poor vram

 

I see, that makes more sense.

 

Anyone else getting these annoying UI glitches when using VFX graph with a camera using a solid background color?

#bug

 

I am making a lightning vfx with my coder friend, what could I do in my vfx graph to help with making it possible to the lightning can bounce between enemies

 

I am trying to use the vfx with the new 2D Renderer, but All my effects are invisible with the 2D renderer .Can someone help me?

 

You could potentially do most of that using the VFX graph.

Do some tutorials and come back when you have a specific question you're stuck on.