Issue: Particles not visible on certain angles

Greetings,

I'm trying to create a meteor shower effect in Unity 5 using particle system.
However I'm experiencing an issue which is ruining everything. When the particle effect is viewed on certain angles, it completely disappears, and then pops up back again when the camera angle changes.

Please see the attached image (animated gif):



The particle system is set to operate in world space. So culling should not happen.
Adding another camera to the particle system is waste of time also. Nothing changes.

I have found several discussions of this same issue around the net. It is very unfortunate to see that this was first reported in year 2011:

Why it has not been fixed, is there some technical limitation?
How can I fix this?

Thanks

 

For world space, simply parent the particle system to the camera and it ought to be fine. It will indeed cull out of bounds. Not sure if bug or not but the resolution for us is to either parent to camera or move it to where the effect will play.

 

Thanks for your reply, hippocoder.

I have tried to parent it to camera, but unfortunately it makes absolutely no difference.

With or without the camera, the particle system says: "Automatic culling is disabled because world space simulation is used. Emission is distance based". So it should work already, even though it doesn't?

 

It is a known and reported bug which I have encountered back in 2012. It is still present in 2015. The problem is that Unity calculates particle bounds automatically and you cannot modify it in any way. It is not exposed for scripting. Sometimes, it does not matter if your simulation is in world space or local space - particles are just being culled. Possible alternative solutions:
1. None.
2. Vote for resolving this bug on issue tracker and wait few more years for Unity devs taking care of it.

http://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/shuriken-is-culling-particles-when-were-using-setparticles
http://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/incorrect-culling-when-using-mesh-rendering-with-shuriken
http://unity3d.com/search?refinement=issues&gq=shuriken culling

 

Thanks varfare,

That was the reply I was afraid of. It's very frustrating when things like these come into your way and prevent you from doing what you planned. And even more when there is nothing you can do about it.

I voted, if that helps anything.

 

Ok, I was able to circumvent the bug. In this case, as the soot is raining down from sky, I had to make an emiter long enough to reach the ground level. Now there is no culling anymore. I hope this helps someone.

 

As of 2016 with Unity 5.4 I've got a similar problem but found a quick fix. This particle system got culled incorrectly just like yours no matter what stimulation space I used. Interestingly though, simply increasing the particle size property within the ParticleSystem component and proportionally decreasing the scale in transform SOLVED it.

In other words, in some cases scaling the transform instead of the particle size, or perhaps having too small particle size while large transform, will not allow correct bound detection and culling behavior. Hope this helps.

 

I ran into this problem today (I'm on 2017.3) and found out it was due to the particle effect playing outside the particle effects bounds. To see if this is happening, you need to enable "Show Bounds" while the particle effect is selected in the Hierarchy window.

I'm not yet sure why this is happening in my specific case, but I have tracked it down to interaction with an IK system I'm using that does changes after Update.

 

Update on my last post. I filed a bug for the above problem (reported in 2017.3) and found out it was already fixed in 2018.1 beta. I confirmed the problem was fixed in 2018.1.0b9.

 

Unity 2017.3.1f1: we've got a similar problem as dichardson.
We have a particle system attached to an item. The item is attached to the hand of biped character: the bounds of the particle system are totally wrong, see the picture:

As you can see the yellow box is wrong location, approximately 1 meter away from the particles. And in render view, the particles don't appear. Particles scale option is set to hierarchy. There is a 0.1 scale on the parent of the particle system's gameobject.