The particles are circling around a center. The trails are messed up on the sides. The problem is dependent on the camera angle. Looking into the vortex from the top does not show any of those problems. Any idea how to fix this?
I guess the trails would work out, if they were oriented (y-axis)*, but I don’t know how to do this in the code. Does anyone know?
*) If I create non-particle trail renderers and circle them around a center they are working as intended. Any way to use those default trail renderers as the particle’s trail renderer?
the mesh data is ‘pinching’ it is simply a factor of the 2-d system trying to orient at cam while aimed obliquelly; that is, a trail moving perfectly at the cams eye would be a 2d line and has no direction to give it width.
the fixes i can think of are
use a ribbon procedural mesh tool (IIRC 5.5 has it working right?)
custom tool on app store,
shader that fades (fresnel calculation)
shader that is not pure additive and uses depth to hide the pinched flare; creative TD required
We are aware of trail/line bugs when they are viewed at “problematic” angles like this. We are investigating possible fixes, but not sure when we will have it fully resolved.
Can you add the option to use the normal trail renderer for particles? They don’t have the issue and seem to have about the same functionality as particle trail renderers.
If you want to solve the glitch without waiting, you can either:
Reduce the trail width and add bloom to thicken the effect.
Forget about Trails module and attach a subemitter to emit small glow particles to stack the trail.
@richardkettlewell , I have a reference video from Persona 5 (0:08 and 0:30) for you. I think most of us don’t really care about not having constant width of particle trail as long as it’s pinch-free.
Final Fantasy 12 (PlayStation 2) did manage to have particle trails with constant width but free of pinching. I think this has something to do with shader to fade the opacity at sharp angle.
Using 5.5.0f3, also getting some annoying spike-looking effect when trails are moving towards camera. Seems especially bad when there’s added Noise to it.
Took some screenshots of one effect I’m working on which is a little bit buggy.
Persona isn’t using trails, those are meshes with panning textures. It’s a really common technique.
And that Final Fantasy 12 video absolutely shows the same “pinching” issue:
These issues have been issues with trails forever and exist in every engine that uses them. Unreal Engine 3 had a feature for awhile that would shrink trails that where “edge on” to try to hide the issue, but it just meant trails often disappeared when you wouldn’t expect them to. The same issue exists with using shaders and inverse fresnel fading, which you can totally do with Unity if you wish. There are some techniques some games / engines have used where edge on trails get faded out and replaced with camera facing quads, but this usually leads to really heavy overdraw and “pill shaped” trail segments.
Go look carefully at any AAA game made in the last 10 years and you’ll probably see these artifacts on things like smoke trails.
Hello, why not at least enable an axis-oriented billboard parameter and a render alignment parameter (like for particles) which are applied for each segment of the trail ? It could solve some case
For example, the case when the trail always have to face one axis, locally or in the world. Or the case each segments are facing the trail velocity, and then tweak the local transform of the Particle System Gameobject.
Why not use as suggested just a mesh with UV animated texture, cheaper, easier to control. It might not work perfectly when viewed from the top, but those type of FX seldom are.
