Non-soft particle shader

I've stumbled upon some strange shader behavior. I'm using Particles/Additive shader (not soft version), but it still have "Soft Particles Factor" controller, and particles still fade out near geometry. Is that a bug or intended? Im using 2017.3 latest.

 

The “Soft” part of “Additive Soft” refers to the blend mode, or how the color output from the shader is mixed with the color in the buffer. It has nothing to do with “soft particles” which modified that output color based on proximity to what’s “behind” the particle prior to the blend.

 

Thanks. Then, how do I create particles with no softness? That would not fade out when close to geometry.

 

You can disable Soft Particles in the Quality settings to disable it for all particle systems.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-QualitySettings.html

You can use the mobile particle shaders instead. They also remove the per material tint color and there are slightly fewer blend modes provided, but otherwise they're equivalent.

Lastly there's the new Standard Particle shaders which are intended to replace both the existing desktop and mobile particle shaders and have a lot more features, including being able to selectively disable soft particles per material.

edit: The Standard Particle shaders should come with Unity as of 2017.3