Scaled particles in Unity

Particles in Unity appearing in front of mesh

I had a weird bug in Unity today where particles that are supposed to be in the background were actually appearing in front of meshes that are closer to the camera.

After quite a lot of searching, the solution is actually simple, but wasn’t obvious so I thought I’d write it here.

So my particles are exactly where they are supposed to be, behind the land mesh. But are appearing in front (see image above).

Unity particles behind mesh

This is actually caused by the particles being scaled. I first found out about it from this thread on Unity Answers, linking to this forum post about it.

If I set the particles’ scale to 1, it resolves itself. I thought I’d have to muck about with sorting orders or layers (still not got to grips with those in Unity yet. Doesn’t seem to change anything to me).