Optimizing Shuriken particle system

After two years of development inside Unity 3.5.7 as a VFX artist I decided to share some knowledge about optimizing Shuriken particle system. I was working on an RTS tile (not yet announced) which had a lot of explosions and environment effects created with Shuriken. In some crazy situations there were about 800-1600 particle systems on the scene. It killed the performance right at the start. The problem was that the art style demanded that many effects on screen and radically cutting the amount of systems was not an option.

Full text can be found on my blog, here http://ethicalmotion.blogspot.com/2014/06/unity3d-optimizing-shuriken-particle.html

I hope that someone will find this helpful!

 

Did you check whether those points are still valid in Unity 4.5?

 

Nope. I don't have access to Unity 4.5 Pro at home so I can't launch profiler and we still use 3.5.7 at work. But I'm 100% sure that mesh emitters and emitting mesh is still quite heavy. Not sure about this "receive/cast" shadows thing and the particle systems doing CPU overhead when they are not emiting or disabled. I've read changelogs and some Shuriken optimizations since 3.5.7 have been done but what is optimized exactly remains a mystery.

 

Thanks for the information! Even if not everything may apply 100% to the current version, it is still very interesting and informative. Thanks!

 

@varfare The link is broken. I think you edited the hyperlink text, but not the link itself.
The 'al' in 'ethical' is missing. Correct link:
http://ethicalmotion.blogspot.com/2014/06/unity3d-optimizing-shuriken-particle.html

 

Thanks. I've fixed the link in the original post.