Hi everyone. I’m new in VFX workshop, working on it couple a month. I have some questions for few things about Unity scene for VFX.
So. My first question about render pipelines. I need use Lightweight or HD RP right? Because in guides on YouTube is very hard to understand what i need to use)
Today i used Lightweight and get some problems with Game view scene like this -
And i don’t know what problem this is.
I started using Shader Graph and for that i will preciate to know about i do something wrong with using RP with shader graph or something.
Second question is - How to understand what size of texture for VFX is good? When i saw guides, they had a good looking textures in their projects, soft, not pixelate. So, my problem is - when i uploading my textures same sizes as guides, i have pixelate on my textures. What kind a problem with this can be? How to repair this or how to understand)
And last question is - Can i use somehow fading like on standart render pipeline with particle system, for example? Because it’s little weird for me, when i use in Color over Lifetime black color for fading, not alpha fading (or what is it) on top of color.
Thank you guys, for attention! Sorry for bad english
I also got quite confused with the new unity render pipelines since it no longer really works with most guides on youtube since they’re made before the RPs, but iall the same features are still there it just takes a bit of looking around since a lot of it has moved places and some even have slightly different names.
But in general I think it mostly comes down to what you wanna make effects for, if you want to do mobile then use LW if you wanna do pc or anything else go with HD.
I had a similar issue to your image when I first started using the RP as well, it’s something to do with transparency, however I did not run into this issue at all in HDRP, just make sure your textures are properly black/transparent .
Texture size I don’t even know what the best is, It depends on how important that texture is to look nice, if it’s a detailed magic circle kinda deal i’d make it big, but if it’s just a basic dot or something like that you can go really small.
Not too sure about the last question, I’ve always used the alpha (the tags ontop of the colour bar) for fading and I think that’s how most people do it.
Hope I could be of some assistance, I’m still pretty new to all of this myself. but on the bright side that means these issues were fresh in my mind since I ran into them myself a little while ago.
Thanks! About last question - i think it’s just my shader problem or something because tags on top doesn’t working for fading and i don’t know how to fix this.)
About new rendering pipelines: recently I worked extensively on new HDRP not for something strictly related to vfx and I wrote few triplanar and custom shaders for that pipeline, especially with Amplify Shader (but same with ShaderGraph). Until now, RP are still on beta so I would think really really carefully to use them for a shipped title. If it’s a particular project or on-site installations (as my cases), if it’s work ok, but they are working on that so there is the chance that you have to rework some stuff, as rendering pipeline can dramatically change… However, for vfx I found many things work pretty well in HDRP (if you don’t need particular stuff) and you can use also the new Visual Graph if you would like to consider gpu stuff. One tool that I suggest you to prepare if you don’t write the shader by your own and you ise the standard lit shader for HDRP is a template (I made a Substamce Designer one, but you can also do it in Photoshop or any other solution) for merging the texture maps with their custom channel arrangement, that it’s pretty time consuming However I found HDRP a pretty stable and good looking solution with good performances, but it depends deeply on your final aim…
For your problems it looks something connecting to alpha cut or smoothness/alpha stuff of the plane… Have you tried different options about transparency methods?
Silly question… if you are using the alpha channel of the texture, did you choose in import setting alpha si transparency? Have you tried with a separated bw targa text to feed the alpha if something change?
I’m not sure if it matches what you seek but if you made a custom shader, did you multiply the texture alpha with the vertex alpha ?
Last time I made nodal shader in Unity, you need the vertex node.
Cheers
I would highly recommend leaving the new render pipelines and shader graph alone if you are a beginner with unity. (a preview that builds upon a preview that isn’t integrated that well)
For costum particle shader: you also have to reference the vertex color. This is what the Particle System component uses for transparency.
Pixelated texture: You said you switched to Light Render Pipeline? This is escpecially for mobile devices. Unity probably compresses+downscales your texture automatically for better performance. You can click on the texture and undo this in the inspector for each one (or write an override script). But, as I said above, just make a new project and stay with the regular pipeline until you are more experienced or the other features are out of preview.
