4.3 stable
Does anyone here know about particle trails?
I’m following this guide: 3D Particle trails — Godot Engine (4.3) documentation in English
No matter what I do, the entire trail vanishes suddenly at the end of it’s life. Is there any way to make it shrink away? Like how it grows into existence at the start of if’s life, but in reverse?
This is done by using RibbonTrailMesh or TubeTrailMesh’s width curve property, which allow you to customize the trail’s width according to a Curve resource. You’ll want to tweak the curve so the leftmost point is at 0, so that the trail grows from no width at all to full width.
You don’t need to modify the ParticleProcessMaterial, only the trail mesh itself.
Thank you for the reply Calinou.
Here is my RibbonTrailMesh’s width curve property:
And here is the result:
The curve changes the shape of the trail along the length of the trail, but as you can see, each trail just “pops” out of existence at the end of it’s life.
In my example here, the particles have a lifetime of 0.8 seconds, while the trail has a lifetime of 0.4 seconds. The problem is that after 0.8 seconds has elapsed, the whole thing vanishes, even though the trail should still exist for another 0.4 seconds on top.
Does that make sense?
I misunderstood what was going on. Change the Scale Curve on the ParticleProcessMaterial so that its end is 0. This will change the particle’s scale relative to its lifetime so that it’s no longer visible at the end (by virtue of being reduced in size).
Thank you for replying once more.
I have done as you suggested, here is the curve:
And here is the resulting behaviour:
As you can see, the trails now get thinner, but the do not get shorter. They still vanish in a “pop”.
Also, the actual shape of the tails is affected; they are now very sharp, while before they were nice and bulbus.
