Thread by @phi6

Finally ported my old particles to HDRP shadergraph!
And poor @Skepsisology has been working on converting our hundreds of VFX prefabs to the new renderer, but it's totally worth it!
Recompile VFX uses 4 different shaders.
Here's how we made them (thread)
#madewithunity #gamedev

First up is the unlit opaque particle shader. This is the most important part of the VFX, and provides all of the core glowing shapes. The bloom ramp is controlled by particle value (intensity), and the alpha cutout is controlled by particle alpha.

Next up is fog/smoke/steam particles. This is an unlit transparent shader with an inverted fresnel fade and soft particle depth. We can layer these up to create a faux volumetric effect!

Finally, for the heat haze and other distortion effects, we have a choice between 2 shaders. A normal map based 2D billboard distortion, and a 3D mesh based distortion.

Here is the 3D mesh distortion subgraph

For the normal map distortion and soft particle subgraphs, you can get these from the HDRP example project from Unity here :-
forum.unity.com/threads/hdrp-p…

The best and most rich VFX requires multiple layers of different particle shader types. And now with HDRP they are all looking better than ever before!