HDRP Built-in Particle Shaders

Am I missing something or are there no built-in particle shaders in the HDRP?

 

I cant answer the question fully because I've not even tried to use existing particle system with HDRP. But I know the grand plan is that the new VFX system is coming and will give us GPU-based particles for HDRP.

And some provisional documentation for the new VFX system already exists, eg: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ScriptableRenderPipeline/wiki/Visual-Effects-Editor

 

from: https://forum.unity.com/threads/fee...-render-pipelines.470095/page-16#post-3558115

 

Aren't VFX and particles two different things? Or is HDRP only going to support VFX? Seems like particle support should happen first before VFX though.

 

Particles are a part of VFX so it's called VFX Editor to cover everything in that area.

 

The VFX system as it is currently described really is a flexible particle system, it doesnt do anything non-particle based and as best I can tell various aspects of the design are all about what makes sense for particles. This still covers quite a lot of territory and I suppose people could 'misuse it' in a way that makes it less obvious that it is a particle system, but thats still really what it is.

Given time I suppose this description by me might prove a little too narrow, but for now I'm sticking to it.

By the way I changed the link in my post about documentation because I was not linking to the highest level of the provisional docs before.

 

Yea, that's pretty much what I meant (my wording was too broad) The majority of the VFX in most games will be particles then others might be shaders, more custom solutions that deal with code(for rendering), models, and simulations.

As far as I can tell particles is what it's made for/aiming at as you mentioned.

 

So how do you change the Default-ParticleSystem material to use this new Shader?
The Shader dropdown is greyed out when I create a legacy particle System.

 

Im trying to convert some old particle systems to HDRP but they look/behave much worse, is there some standard way of doing it that gets them back to what they were like?

And which shader should I use? how to set actual opacity?

 

It is in FX/Flare

 

FX/Flare doesant work properly here. Im so frustrated I have spent hundreds on particle systems and cant use any of them.

 

Awesome, does this show how to convert old particle systems? would be awesome, often when I swap shader to anything but standard (then use wizard) it just loses all the textures.

 

REALLY painful man!..
and how not to lose textures?

 

If you need to swap a lot of content this way, I'd look into modifying the HDRP particle SG's and change their input properties (actual variable names, not the visual names) to match the old shaders variable names. This would let you swap the shaders in place better without losing the references to textures etc.

Or if you have more time to dedicate for this, just write some conversion script that remaps the materials, you'd have better time with this approach as there can be some reserved variable names on HDRP/SRPs you can't or shouldn't use for whatever reason on shader graphs.

 

As a side note, would be nice if Unity could convert, say this sample pack for URP and HDRP shaders: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/tutorial-projects/unity-particle-pack-127325

It's probably the most polished Shuriken example and being able to see how you should map the SRP shaders for it could be valuable reference for people who are migrating to SRPs. Not everyone will just jump to Visual Effect Graph immediately when they have old content authored with the Shuriken setup.

 

I agree It would be super helpful!!