I’m working on a 3D top-down game in Godot 4.7, and I’m finding the workflow for basic 2D sprite particles (like smoke or fire) incredibly frustrating and clunky compared to other engines.
Coming from Unity or Unreal Engine 5, creating a smoke puff is a one-click process where 2D sprites/billboards are the default behavior. In Godot, GPUParticles3D is completely invisible out of the box because it only handles math, forcing the user into a rigid, manual setup:
You must manually create and assign a PlaneMesh just to see the particle.
You must manually configure a material and explicitly turn on Billboarding.
Out of the box, these meshes clip harshly into floors and walls like rigid cardboard cutouts, requiring you to dig into Proximity Fade settings just to get acceptable visual quality.
While I love Godot’s lightweight nature and fast GPU compute performance, this specific pipeline feels like a Russell’s teapot — an arbitrary, archaic workaround for something that should be automated by the engine. Forcing developers to manually instantiate 3D geometry for basic 2D visual effects creates a massive, unnecessary friction point.
Yeah it’s a pretty low-level system, CPU particles are higher level which is nice for 2D especially.
Some of those settings could be automated, creating a new built-in resource for particle processing and a quad drawpass with a standard material would help but I’m going to change settings in those resources anyways, not sure it would save much time. More annoying if I intend on re-using my other particle resources or a non-billboard sprite particle. It’s less rigid of a setup as you propose, every step is there for a reason, you just seem to have one goal, maybe enforced by other engines.
Obviously Godot doesn’t come with a smoke-puff asset, so it can’t have a “make smoke button” nor should it.
Do you mean a masochist’s teapot? Like from the cover of “The Design of Everyday Things”? Seems more relevant than arguing belief versus evidence.
It just feels… unaesthetic. You know somewhere in your project hiding a lot of invisible things (even if nobody can proof). They aren’t doing harm, they just exist, but you started to look on other games with suspicion.
There already many ad-hocks in gamedev (like baking shadows or 3D to 2D animation shortcuts), so adding a new group could be overwhelming for a designer.
Lots of asset packs available to fill that void until the opensource priorities get around to a QoL pass on particles. e.g. Search results for 'binbun' - itch.io