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Trail


By moving the Trail object in virtual space, for example by attaching it to a traveling spaceship or any other moving object in your project, you can render a 3d trail.

You can use this object for ammunition tracers, tire-marks, continuous smoke trails, reference lines and so on.

Trail shape, colors, opacity, lifetime and smoothness are definable and some presets are included.

The trail emitter is an object you can place and orient visually in the Virtual Editor.



Change

Click this button to select the trail segment aspect. You can make your own trail shapes as follows:

  • By using your favorite paint program, make a picture which includes an alpha (opacity) layer. The alpha map is used to make parts of your picture transparent. See the documentation for your paint program for details about alpha layers.


  • To guarantee compatibility with all systems, the image should be power-of-two-sized, like for example 256x256, 128x512 and so on.


  • Save your picture to .tga, .png or .dds format to the

    C:\Program Files\3D Rad\3DRad_res\objects\Trail\Data\

    folder.


  • Resize your picture to 128x128 pixels and save it again as a .jpg file to the

    C:\Program Files\3D Rad\3DRad_res\objects\Trail\Data\Index\

    folder. This image will be used to display your new shape in the Trail object's dialogs and make it selectable among the other shapes available.


    • Parameters

  • If the Working At Start option is not checked, the trail will only be emitted after the object is started by another object, like for example EventOnInput.


  • Render mode. Burn-out rendering technique blends overlapping trails together also making them look like bright plasma.


  • Color (initial/final). Click the color buttons to open the color picker.


  • Opacity (0-1). The lower the value, the more transparent the trail.


  • Frequency (trail segments per second) is the number of trail segments emitted every second.


  • Lifetime (in seconds) determines how quickly the trail will vanish.


  • Size (in meters) can be any value above 0, but keep in mind that bigger trails are slower to render.




    • Other dialog controls

    The remaining property dialog controls are common to all objects. They are explained here.


    INTERNAL PARAMETERS


    The following internal parameters can be set by using objects like Script:

  • Frequency (trail segments per second), write only
  • Opacity (between 0 and 1), write only

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