I have been working on and off on a simple system to show a couple of effects using line renderers, which I call LineFX.
LineFX currently contains two components; SpiralTrail and ArcTrail.
SpiralTrail was the product of an idea to draw the typical “Railgun” spiral trail. After getting the initial code to push points into a line renderer I went on refining and adding settings to it to expose a lot of controls to the inspector, and SpiralTrail is the latest iteration of this.
Here’s a shot of some of the effects that LineFX can do, aswell as the EditorGUI for SpiralTrail:
http://www.danielschneider.se/unity/linefx/linefx_spiral.jpg
I later modified my already solid base in SpiralTrail to render something resembling electrical arcs, because I needed it for my Space Corridor project. The code eventually ended up as ArcTrail.
Here’s a shot of the same effects that LineFX can do, but with an ArcTrail selected:
http://www.danielschneider.se/unity/linefx/linefx_arc.jpg
As you can see from the shots above, a lot of settings can be animated.
Color is animated at both the start and end points of the individual line renderers using an animationcurve to interpolate between two colours. Width of the beams are also animated like this. Radius is also animated like this, but has an additional Shape curve attatched that defines the profile of the radius, to allow some interesting shapes.
LineFX also handles UV tiling and animation on all the effects.
Since I’m not a very experienced coder, with no training at all, I don’t expect it to be super-efficient, but it gets the job done, with little hassle for the end user.
Simply edit a prefab with all the settings to your likings, instantiate it during runtime. Feed a start and end position or transform to it, and it runs itself from there on.
Live demo available here
I intend to release it here shortly.
