Assets Lit smoke particle with volume

Hello! I've been experimenting lately with a lot of VFX using Substance Designer, Unity's particle system and Amplify Shader Editor most of which you can find here.

I recently created a smoke VFX using substance designer to animate it which worked out pretty well. The only issue was it was only really working well from one camera angle and even then the lighting was still slightly incorrect.

The other side of the issue was Unitys particle billboard system is pretty dumb, if you rotate the camera on the spot the particles rotate too. This is because they actually face the opposite direction from the cameras direction instead of just looking at the camera. I actually solved this problem and I'll do another recording to show it off but basically I set the renderer to use a mesh (just a quad) and with that comes the option to set the mesh to point toward the camera ... Why the billboard system isnt like that already I will never know.

Anyway here's a video of the effect in action, I run through the lighting first by rotating the directional light and then moving a point light around it. At the end of the video I roughly rotate the camera around the effect to show it's volume.

If anyone knows a good way to make soft particles in Amplify shader editor please feel free to say.

 

I wrote a blog post about my solution to lighting particles correctly!

https://www.artstation.com/mattywyettsimmonds/blog/b1w3/lit-smoke-particle-with-volume