VFX particle mesh material?

Hey @laurentlavigne ,

The Output Mesh is a different context, it doesn't output particles, but rather single meshes. For example, maybe you want your particles to circle around a sphere which moves around and it's easier to sync it within the graph rather than having a sphere game object and animate it via C# and feed its position into the VFX Graph. You can change its shader simply by assigning a new shader or Shader Graph here:


As for mesh particles, you can change the default shader of the Output Particle Mesh in a few ways.
First of, you can change thing like the Blend Mode to make the particles Opaque, use alpha-cutoff, etc. directly in the output:


A few other options are available in the Inspector when you select the output (things like culling, shadow-casting, etc.):


And last, but not least, we have an experimental integration with Shader Graph if you'd like to do something more custom (i.e. fresnel effect).

You can go to Preferences and enable the VFX experimental features:


This would enable you to assign VFX Shader Graphs directly in Output Particle Mesh:


Exposed properties in shader graph will appear as inputs on your VFX output.

Hope this helps!

 

Yup, the VFX itself is using compute shaders, which is why the VFX Graph requires compute-capable devices. The URP integration is still being worked on and is not production ready. Even when it becomes production-ready, it will still only target devices which can run compute shaders, and not the whole range of URP-supported devices (though in the long run we plan on supporting VFX CPU particles).

Yup, we got these samples.
The Magic Book and the Bonfire samples (if I remember correctly) use the Shader Graph integration.

 

Per-particle culling is on the GPU. CPU culling would be for the VFX component itself based on its bounds which you set in Initialize.

A bunch of ways you can do this. For example, you can check the distance of particles compared to the Main Camera Transform and Set Alive to true if they are closer than a certain threshold, and false if they are further away.