Experimenting more with the particles animator, we wanted to try and simulate some effects that you might imagine being used in-game. The first one we tried was the fairly commonly seen fire effect.

Because particles can use any material type, we chose to create a collection of billboards with a circular color gradient on the texture, then apply an ADD blendmode to the resulting mesh so that each particle appears with a soft edge. We could have also approached this with a transparent png texture for the particle, however, the blendmode approach generally has a more consistent performance across GPUs.