Question The effect only starts playing when I see it

Hello,

I think what your are looking for is an option of VisualEffectAsset reachable through the inspector "Culling Flags" :


You can find more information about these settings : https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.visualeffectgraph@7.1/manual/VisualEffectGraphAsset.html

Note that the bounding box is always used for rendering part, this option only affects if the bounding box is recomputed or VisualEffect simulates while the bounding box is offscreen.

 

It isn't negligible : it will process the update of the visual effect component even if the bound is out of the frustum, it's comparable to activate the "Update When Offscreen" on Skinned Mesh Renderer, in some isolated cases, it's really what you want.

If you are looking for an initial state where the system has been "filled" with some particles, maybe you could consider to use the Prewarm settings in VisualEffectAsset.



It will simply process a few frames (assuming you kept the "PreWarm Step Count" to a small value) before the first rendering, it's appropriate if you are doing a simple fire effect for instance.