Particle Materials

Particles rendering uses a dedicated shader domain that supports sprite, model and ribbon particles. To use custom material for your particles ensure to select Domain to Particle in Material Window.

Particle Attributes

Particle materials can easily access any attribute of the rendered particle. You can use predefined nodes such as Particle Color, Particle Normalized Age, or Particle Mass. If your particle system uses any custom attributes shader can read them via Particle Attribute node. Simply specify the attribute name and type and the data will be available to read.

Sprite sheet animation

Many particle systems such as smoke, fire, and explosions use sprite sheet to animate the particle texture over time. To do so simply use Flipbook node that implements sampling the sprite sheet.

Volumetric particles lighting

When creating volumetric particles such as smoke, dust, or fog, lighting should be calculated without directional specular component to make an impression of diffusive volumetric media. To do it change Transparent Lighting Mode to Surface Non Directional. This will disable specular lighting and remove directionality from shadowing thus making particles look like a volume.

Also, you can check Enable Global Illumination to apply indirect lighting (if used) to the particles.