Ribbon particles disappearing at certain camera angles?

Development Rendering
1

I’m using a ribbon particle for the shots of a laser gun, which looks pretty good. However there is a problem. At certain camera angles the ribbon particles disappear and I’m wondering if there is a way to stop this from happening. Take a look at the following images.

In the first image, the camera is looking from the direction of the shooter. So the ribbon particles are starting at the bottom of the image and travelling up the image. At a certain point (marked by the red arrow) they fade out. It seems as though once the angle between the ribbon particle and the camera vector goes below a certain point, the particles fade out. If I raise the camera up higher (to create a bigger angle) then the particles are visible for longer.
fadeout2.png

In the second image, the camera is looking towards the shooter. So the ribbon particles are coming from the top of the image and travelling down the image. At a certain point (marked by the red arrow) they fade back in. Again, it seems as though once the angle between the particle and the camera vector becomes great enough they become visible again. I can control that “visible” point by raising or lowering the camera.
fadein2.png

How can I stop this from happening. I would really like the particles to always be visible from any camera angle. Maybe a ribbon particle is the wrong thing to use. If so, can anyone suggest an alternative way to achieve what I’m trying to do?

2

If what you discribe is what I experienced, this is very old bug.
While developing my indie game’s fx I came across this issue several times. The only way to fix it when a particle system was presenting this issue I found… Was deleting the particle and recreating it as another .asset file then the issue would simply not happen; pretty weird.

3

Thanks for the suggestion, but unfortunately that doesn’t solve the problem. After further testing, I’ve found that the problem seems to also happen with small meshes too. I tried changing the laser shots to be long thin meshes instead of ribbon particles and I get the same problem. So the issue obviously isn’t specific to just ribbon particles. Is there some sort of engine optimization going on that fades things out when they don’t use enough pixels on the screen or something?