DOCUMENTATION
GPU Playback
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Unsupported root or parent transforms now block the whole playback with an Error, including collision tracks. Exact permits XYZ rotation; Adaptive Landing permits Y rotation only. Both require positive uniform scale.
Exact: positive uniform scale and XYZ rotation. Adaptive Landing: positive uniform scale and Y-axis rotation only, with world up aligned. Parents count too. Rotating Exact also rotates the recorded fall; it does not recalculate gravity.
A Transform Error blocks Play and scrubbing. Check the root and parents for non-uniform, zero/negative scale, shear or Adaptive tilt. If this happens while playing, playback pauses, effects clear and debris drawing/collision tracks stop. Correct the Transform and press Play; RVFX does not automatically change it.
At world scale other than 1, set Main > Scaling Mode = Hierarchy on each Particle System in enabled effect prefabs, including nested children. The Select Particle System button finds the listed system. This is a Warning, so playback remains allowed. Disabled filters/slots are ignored; inactive children are checked but stay inactive. Hierarchy does not change world-space gravity/velocity settings or Adaptive event timing.
Select the baked prefab or its scene instance and open RVFX Piece Transform Playback → Effects. Replace a slot's Prefab, adjust Scale, or use Add Effect / Remove inside an existing baked filter. The motion does not need to be rebaked; recorded event times and points remain unchanged.
Use Lifetime & Placement for Auto/Timed lifetime, Emission Limit, World Offset, Align Impact and Follow Playback. Refresh Effects recreates the preview at the current playback time after editing a prefab or its particle materials. Edit materials on the Particle System Renderer inside the effect prefab. Duplicate both prefab and material first if the change should not affect other users of those assets.
Edit outside Play Mode to save changes. Scene-instance changes are prefab overrides; apply them deliberately when updating the shared prefab. Rebuilding the playback prefab from the Rig replaces these settings with the Rig's effect setup.
The prefab root does not need a Particle System. Active child and nested Particle Systems are controlled together, including sub-emitters without double simulation. Inactive children remain inactive. Animator, VFX Graph, audio and custom scripts do not automatically follow the playback clock.
Scrubbing rebuilds particles at the selected time. In Play Mode, late particles can finish after the body motion ends; Pause freezes that tail, and Stop clears it. Changing a prefab preserves the current body frame and tail time.
Trigger conditions and recorded event data still belong to the Rig. If no filters were baked, author them in Rig → GPU Playback → Effects and build the playback prefab first. Longer effect lifetimes or added slots can change how many spawns pass the existing cap and distance rules, even though the recorded events stay unchanged.
Legacy bakes allow replacing existing slots and adjusting their total Lifetime. Rebuild from the Rig for modern filters, Add Effect and Auto/Timed particle tails.
Select the baked prefab or its scene instance and open RVFX Piece Transform Playback → Debris. Each row is a Mesh / Material pair. Drag a new Mesh asset into Mesh and its material into Material; different rows can use different pairs.
The replacement changes the visible debris. Recorded positions, rotations, spawn times and lifetimes stay unchanged, so no rebake is needed for an appearance change. It does not recalculate physics, collisions or Height Adaptive landing. Choose a mesh with a similar size and pivot.
Rows keep their baked slot assignments and cannot be added, removed or reordered here. Clearing a Mesh uses a fallback box without shifting the other rows. One material is used for all submeshes in that row. GPU playback copies supported surface properties into the RVFX indirect shader; custom shader behavior is not automatically transferred.
Edit outside Play Mode to save changes. Scene-instance edits are prefab overrides; apply them when the shared prefab should change. Rebuilding from the Rig replaces these playback-level edits. The same controls are included in new Portable Playback exports with Include Playback Runtime enabled.
Particle-event limitation: Adaptive Landing adjusts body/debris landing, but particle events retain their recorded times and positions. They are not retimed to corrected contacts. Check effects at each intended height and scale; Hierarchy scaling does not solve this timing limitation.
Include Playback Runtime includes the Playback Inspector, with Preview, Effects, Debris Mesh / Material pairs, Transform errors and particle scaling warnings. Import the matching runtime and Inspector together to update an older transfer. A Content Only package does not upgrade these controls. The receiving project does not need the RVFX authoring tools.
For an older transfer showing Unity's default Inspector, export again from the updated tool with Include Playback Runtime enabled, then import the matching runtime and Inspector files together. This does not require rebaking the animation.
A content-only package keeps the runtime and Playback Inspector already installed in the destination. Use Include Playback Runtime when installing or updating those controls. With the full tool installed, its normal Playback Inspector takes precedence over the portable fallback Inspector.
GPU Playback PDF — includes scale, rotation and particle warnings
GPU Playback PDF — includes scale, rotation and particle warnings