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Particle effects dissapear when camera too close

by Mark Lacay · in Torque X 3D · 01/23/2009 (7:06 am) · 3 replies

I am having a problem where the particle effects I have in a scene are disappearing when I move the camera too closely. They appear fine when the camera is some distance away... The setup for the particle emitter is with a 1.5 gravity. This sucks because it ends up being visible only when my character is in 3rd person view.

As an interesting side note, when I set the gravity on the particles to negative and they float upwards, the particles are visible regardless of how close the camera is (for the most part) weird stuff huh?

Anybody else experience this or can confirm that it's not just me?
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Torque 3D Owner Charles Speer
#1
02/25/2009 (1:41 pm)
I have found that my particles are fine when their emitter is always in the camera's view. They even still show when the emitters are a certain distance outside of the camera's view. However, there is a 'sweet spot' distance that when it's that far out of view from the camera, it doesn’t show.

My guess is because the engine figures it doesn't need to draw the emitter (or something like that) and the particles cease to spew from the emitter as a result. This was much more apparent when I added rain falling from the sky. In a 2D perspective, if the rain was at the 'roof' of the level, and my character dropped too far down from that roof (with the camera following him) the rain would disappear. It would reappear once I started my way back up.

If I find time to dig into the actual problem and find a fix, I will reply once again to this thread. If you happen to find it first, please share :).

Hope this helps!

Torque Owner Peter Dwyer
#2
02/25/2009 (3:03 pm)
Your emitter is being culled as it is deemed to be out of visual range. I'm not sure what culling method is being used but, it's probably a bounding algorithm of some kind.

Associate John Kanalakis
EnvyGames
#3
03/23/2009 (10:28 am)
Try changing the camera's properties for the near clipping plane. It's probably set to 1. If you set it to 0 or even almost 0, like 0.0001, it won't be clipped when you're too close.

John K.
www.envygames.com