Halo particle rendering bug

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

I’m seeing a strange error in Blender 2.48. I’m curious if anyone has seen this and if anyone knows a way to work around it.

I have two particle systems. Particle system A is a column of fire emitted from a small mesh and rising upward. Particle system B is a doughnut shaped ring of cloud particles. The fireball is falling through the center of the doughnut. The fire particles are rendered as point halos. The cloud particles are rendered as sphere mesh objects. They have a flat black material with 0.1 alpha to partially obscure the fire that’s behind them.

So here’s the problem. When I render the scene I can only see the halo’s that are in front of the sky. Fire particles (halos) that have cloud particles behind them don’t render. I verified that it isn’t something dumb like incorrect particle settings or lighting. If I hide the layer with the cloud particles, then all the fire particles render correctly. When I re-add the clouds, then the fire particles in front of the clouds won’t render.

Has anyone seen something like this before? I’m stuck.

2

Halo is, in effect, a post render process. Don’t use halo if you want it to look good.

3

This is not an area of expertise for me, but perhaps you could try rendering the particles systems in two passes (using render layers), and composite them together along with the normal rendering.