Making particles appear above scene objects?

Hi

I can't figure this out and would love some help. Is there a simple way to have particles (from a particleSystem) always render above the MeshRenderers/SkinnedMeshRenderers in my scene (regardless of position)?

My big particles get obstructed off by the floor, and i want them to always render the entire particle.

I'm using unity 2019 and URP.

Thanks for your help,
-Michael

 

In the Particle System, try playing with the Renderer section. Specifically the Sorting Layer ID and Order in Layer.



I believe higher sorting layers will render after (on top of) earlier layers.

 

Thanks, I experimented with the sort order pretty extensively and it doesn't seem to effect anything (in my setup). But maybe I'm missing something obvious?


If i changed renderer.renderMode to "mesh" this fixes it. I'm unsure what else this change will break though, would love some advice here if anyone has dealt with this before.

 

Maybe render your particles on a separate camera? Set the second camera to have a higher depth value, so it renders after the main camera.

 

So, here we are in 2023, and I've been doing this, but it's extremely expensive.

I only have 1 object in my entire game that's on a specific layer that I have an extra camera for.

Reducing cameras is an easy way to increase FPS/performance of your game, so I'd like to know if there's a solution to this problem without requiring another camera.

 

And you have checked in either the Profiler or Frame Debugger that this is actually a problem??

I question both of these assertions. Are you properly culling what each camera sees?

If Camera1 sees everything EXCEPT these particles and Camera2 sees ONLY the particles, the result should be nearly identical performance-wise.

Go see for yourself in the Frame Debugger... Window -> Analysis -> FrameDebugger.

Yes there is a tiny bit of overhead but I certainly wouldn't call it "extremely expensive." Plus the overhead seems to be constant regardless of how many objects are seen by either Camera, for a given scene.