Creating a trail wave

Unity Engine
,
1

I’m trying to create a trail wave effect using particle strips (recreating a league of legends effect for educational purposes). I’ve used a sine wave with an offset to adjust the y velocity, however sadly my trail doesn’t look that great. I’m not sure how to describe it technically, but visually it doesn’t look natural, like the wave looks clearly generated behind my trail, rather than my trail moving in a wave - if that makes sense. I think one aspect is that the trail doesn’t look like it’s following the parent object, but I want to keep the y position of the parent object constant. Can anyone advise on how I can improve the trail wave? I will provide a reference to the effect I’m attempt to recreate. Thanks for any advice :slight_smile:

EDIT: I updated the VFX Screenshot to be a bit clearer, made it smaller by deleting inactive blocks. It would be cool if there was a better way to show graphs in this forum (VFX Graph to Mermaid tool? :smile:)

VFX Graph:

1023×1151 89 KB

Current Trail:
o20060
Effect I’d like to achieve:
0p44ln

2

There is no way to read the picture of your graph, it’s too small, but I think you are are applying velocity wrong, you don’t want your trail to move towards the source or maybe just a tiny bit, instead it looks more like upward and downward in the reference.
Something like that I guess (there is no interpolation and my hand is not too smooth :smile:) :

9236142--1290459--GIF 20.08.2023 14-17-31.gif

9236142--1290462--upload_2023-8-20_14-20-13.png
9236142--1290462--upload_2023-8-20_14-20-13.png753×372 33.7 KB

// Edit: just noticed you are changing velocity every frame, you just need to init particles with some initial velocity, and to make it look better you could add a little bit of drag in the update.

1 Like
3

Thanks so much Qriva! Using the initialize context has produced a much better effect :slight_smile:

What it looks like now:
gmxyzc

These are the adjustments I made if anyone is interested:

  • Set the velocity like in Qriva’s reply and add a Lerp node to interpolate the current velocity

  • Reduced the lifetime

  • Added a Drag block to the update context

  • Scaled the initial size of the particles with the sine wave amplitude to make the peaks and troughs in it a bit wider

Unfortuntaely now I can’t mess with the ampltiude too much, since the Lerp node will not work as well, which I guess makes sense since the higher value range. I will probably need to clamp the size too since the trail can get a bit thin. If anyone has any other advice I appreciate it :smile: