To create a sphere which would leave a SHORT trail behind?

Questions & Answers
1

Hello,

Game : 3D, mobile

We have an orb in our game. Just to define an orb it is a spherical body; a globe.

Now this spherical body (Orb), translates itself from one Vector3 Postion to the other at any point of time. The movement is controlled from code.

Now when it moves, it should leave a trail which should not be longer than a particular length. The breath of the trail should be decreasing propotionatly and end with a tip.

EXPERIMENTS :

Trail Renderer :

I tried trail renderer, but with that trail renderer - the issues was no matter how the trail poisitions itself facing the camera there were certain points where it looked definetly 2D.

Particle System : (The below picture is from a particle system centered on that sphere GameObject and it subsequently leaves a trail.)

[12781-screen+shot+2013-07-03+at+2.20.11+pm.png|12781]

The above particle system worked pretty fine but with these issues

  1. High amount of particles system which was evident when the particle came close to the camera, the FPS dropped. Not a major issue.

  2. When the orb was travelling fast, the trail was longer and also it left spots where the particle system took time to die. When I say spots - they were visually like children of the particle system of smaller size left behind. First prioritized issue. Need to fix it first.

You Tube Orb Movement Video

I did record a VIDEO for the orb and listed the major issues in that video. Kindly give it a look. It is how exactly I want the orb to work but not able to solve the issues.

I did take a screen shot of the particle system (orb) component window on the inspector pane, if it turns out to be needy.

[12782-particle-system+component+window+.png|12782]

HELP:

I have been working on this for a long time but yet to find the right solution. If I could just fix the second issue which is curtailing the trail to a max length & it not leaving spots. It would be a great step forward. Any help is highly appreciated.

I hope I was clear in what I was trying to explain. If you think I have missed something or if you were not able to understand certain things, Kindly let me know. I would love to clear the doubts.

Thank you

regards,

Karsnen.

2

I believe you want to change the lifetime of the particles to be lower to get a shorter trail.