Particles do not show up in render?

[WaffletimeCat]

As title suggests, I'm trying to make a poster with particles in it. Whenever I check the shot timeline to check how my camera work would look in a render, the particles disappear.
Here's what I see while I'm working: http://i.imgur.com/Y89y55X.png
Here's what I see in the render preview: http://i.imgur.com/o2tTtkd.png

Any special settings I need to have my particles rendered?

[Marco Skoll]

Just as a friendly reminder, before it causes trouble with a moderator (as and when we ever see one around here) or you start an argument with someone:

Discussions Rules and Guidelines
General Rules
Do not do any of the following:
<blah blah blah>
* Bump threads

Anyway...

Although particles obviously don't first appear until the shot is "reset", they should then render by default.

The reason why people aren't really helping is that you're not really giving enough information that we can guess why they're not working in your case.
So, which particle is this, what are your camera/sample settings, and what do you mean by "for a while"?

[WaffletimeCat]

woops about that rule, sorry.
And I think I'll just photoshop the sword trail in. Thanks anyways.

[Marco Skoll]

I'd still say it's a problem that's worth fixing!

However, we're not psychic. When you say vague things like "for a while", I don't even know if it's a problem you've always had or if it's only more recently that you've had an issue with getting particles to show up. And differences like that can mean totally different fixes are needed.

[WaffletimeCat]

Oh, its for this particle, and I believe this is the only particle I've ever had this issue with.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=263597554

[WaffletimeCat]

I believe it had something to due with my locks on it, so no need to further investigate! Thanks for sticking with it though.

[episoder]

i got this too. the trial particles got that issue to not always show up in the clip editor. means when you scrub or play and pause. you just gotta render it. when played back they render... right?!?

in case of posters (you should not render posters at all tho). you render an image from the clip editor. if the particles glitch you gotta retry to play it back until they remain visible. to precisely snapshot you can even advance in the clip editor frame by frame. no need to butcher with photoshop. ;)

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=804003635

[WaffletimeCat]

Well I've gotten so far that the particles show up in the preview, but when I actually do Export > Poster it doesn't carry the particles over. However, if I do export image it does. Does export image lower the quality at all?

[Marco Skoll]

Export image is actually higher quality, as it exports the full resolution version of the preview image without any of the bugs of poster exports (no bloom, flex smoothing, some particle problems...).

For full quality, you do however need to wait for the sample counter in the bottom right of the screen to finish counting up to your sample quality (whatever that is currently set to. I'd recommend at least 32 and quite probably more) and back to 1.

Normally it only exports at 720p, but it can be made to export at up to 4K by starting SFM in 4K mode, setting render resolution (in video exports), then saving (ideally as a new file) and restarting.
It's a bit of a pain, but SFM... well, it's buggy, Valve aren't updating it and so you have to use a lot of odd workarounds at times.

[WaffletimeCat]

Well exporting as an image is miles faster than rendering the poster anyways, so I'll be sure to use that in the future. Thanks for the help!