[Official] Particle System [Shuriken] Improvements

Ok, I know I'm asking for things all the time, but can we also have an option to add a random offset on the X and Y UV coordinate per trail / ribbon? Since Trails/Ribbons don't accept Custom Data there's just no way to have a randomised offset. It all just looks very repetitive (which is fine in some cases, but in most cases is not).

 

Would it possible to get Sorting Fudge for trails? It seems to be only available for Billboards and Meshes but not for Trails.

 

I hope you had a good time off!

I know, I know, but one can only hope good chap Richard can squeeze in a feature or two here and there for us VFX folks destined to work with Shuriken

Oh, would it also be possible to get "Apply Active Color Space" and "Visualise Pivot" toggles visible for Trails too?

 

It does work as it should but I often only render trails and set Render Mode:None and this makes the "apply active color space" tickbox disappear from the UI. I have to change Render Mode back to somthing else than None to make the tickbox visible.

This is the same for visualise pivot. It works as I would expect it to work with ribbons and trails but the tickbox simply doesn't show up when Render Mode is set to None.

 

Is your focus still only on the VFX graph? Do you have any further plans for Shuriken (or things you'd personally add or improve on with the system) ?

Also I was wondering about some terminology- how come it's called 'Rotation over Lifetime' when it functions more like 'Rotation (Degrees) per second'? That also makes me think it would be useful having a option to rotate it exactly a set amount of degrees over a particles lifetime- especially if you have a random lifetime between two constants.

 

I can tell you from my experience that we used Shuriken because the URP wasn't ready for prime time in the time frame where changing render pipelines was viable. In some ways still isn't ready.

 

We use Shuriken because when we started on VFX for the project little over a year ago, VFX graph wasn't compatible with URP to a satisfactory level and it has had dubious support for mobile devices (we aim PC + mobile). So Shuriken was the only available option really. On top of that, the messaging at that time was VFX graph would be for high-end compute mobile devices only, which in our case was too limiting. We want to release on high-end mobiles but not all of them have compute capabilities as of today. I've seen that VFX graph will be able to run on the CPU at some point tho.

Now we already have a massive library of VFX made with Shuriken so even if VFX graph would support URP and non-compute mobiles (or we decide to only support mobile compute), we wouldn't want to end up supporting two different particle systems. We'd love to transition at some point but damn, this might be too much work for us. Maybe if there was a VFX Graph supplied by Unity that replicates all Shuriken modules so that we don't have to set it all up from scratch?

 

This would be a great way of helping teams like mine to transition to the new shiny tool. Our team could certainly re-create all the features we've been using in Shuriken, but the up-front time cost is quite high and development never sleeps!

 

I've been working on particle assets just about every day for the Asset Store the last 8 years, so Shuriken is just burnt into my brain. I like the compact list view of all the modules and it's very fast and easy to work with it. I can't give much feedback on VFX Graph yet, but it seems similar to Shader Graph where my problem is that I forget the names of the modules I need to search for.

I would love to support my shuriken VFX for all 3 pipelines, but there are minor differences that makes it more difficult, e.g. in HDRP there is no 'Standard Particle Shader' - which would be super useful, considering the amount of useful packs that are available on the Asset Store.

From what I've read, I believe both Shuriken and VFX Graph has their strengths and weaknesses, so I don't see why they can't both be valid choices for the different pipelines.

 

VFX Graph is more modern and adjusted to modern hardware architecture. It can take in way more data types, simulate more particles and has much more flexible behaviours set. At the end of the day, more suited for any VFX task. When CPU simulation pass will be introduced there will be very little reasons to stay with Shuriken, apart from having it run on legacy or ongoing projects. The only thing you'd loose with VFX graph is the UI layout, which I believe will be possible to re-introduce with clever param organisation and some custom editor scripting.

 

I have not touched VFX graph yet, but looking at images, it appears to use visual coding, so I hate it already. I though the user interface of Shuriken was a step down from the legacy particle system because of those fiddly little windows playing around with lines in tiny boxes. This looks another step down.