Particle billboards with emissive and specular

Hello, I'm starting to play around with the VFX graph, and I wondered whether it's possible to render billboards that contribute emissive light to the scene. This also got me wondering whether billboards can have specular/roughness properties? Are either of these things possible?

I've read that the physics engine in Unity can't read the VFX graph position data from the graphics card for doing things like bouncing particles, and I imagine that this will involved the same issue.

I wondered whether it was possible to use the old particle system to drive the nex vfx graph as a hacky solution, so I would generate a few particles using the old system that could interact physically with the environment, and then use the position of each of those particles as the starting point to spawn other particles using the VFX graph. Is that something that people have done in the past?

 

Right now if you're using any Ouput Particle Lit Quad / Octagon / Triangle, you can use HDRP lit features such as Specular/Metallic + Roughness BRDF.

If you need to enable Emissive on these outputs you can do so in the inspector by selecting the Output Lit context and enable the Options "Use Emissive" or "Use Emissive Map".



After enabling any of these you will have more slots visible on the context to either set an emissive color and/or the emissive map.

If you need to control emissive using the particle color, you can also the Color Mode and select any combination of Base Color and/or Emissive.

Finally, if you want more custom control over lit feature and emission, you can also use a VFX ShaderGraph and enable its "Lit" option so it can be used on any Lit Output Context.

 

Necroing an old thread but is this possible in URP? The "Output particle quad" I cant find a lit option or similar nodes? (Have experimental checked in settings)

 

I might do that. I don't really need my particles be affected by light but I want to have a glow effect on them and I could not find a way to do that really. Did have my go at creating a vfx shader but well, not that impressive so far

 

Thank you very much for your detailed explanation. Somehow I hadn't figured out why glow behaved like it does. Do you happen to have a reference on how to apply it to texture. What I mean is I have a particle that I want to have a white line with glow around it. So I can't intensify the whole color of the particle, if that makes sense?

Again, thank you very much for your help. I don't know if VFX isn't as established as other tools or if it is basically directed against visual effect artists (who knows a lot more about this than me already) but it is a bit hard to find resources.