Hi all,
I was wondering if anyone had any tips on dealing with making trails off high speed projectiles.
Currently I am creating a mesh off the back of the projectile and resizing to its speed. But its difficult to visualize at such a high speed, slower speeds its working fine.
Any advice would be great thanks!
Depends on the application you’re using the effect for. A first person shooter might be better off with line trace/hit-scan setup for bullets, in which case it would be better to use a beam with a fast panning texture for the tracer. If you’re using actual projectiles, will the arc or move around, or will they only travel in a straight line? For straight line, just use a mesh like you’re already using; there’s not a lot you can do to get it to look better if it’s moving really really fast. If it arcs, use a ribbon trail and try and move it’s starting point in front of the projectile. When ribbons move too fast in world space, they lag behind their emitter a bit
Hey Travis,
Appreciate the reply. Ok that sounds great, I will begin to implement the beam method, I just wanted to check other possible solutions/if there was anything i was missing with the mesh implementation!
It does seem like I have just hit the limitation with mesh particles as when its slower its working fine. Unfortunately it has to be the speed it is, so i will look at the beam alternative.
Thanks again for your time!
No prob. Yeah, you’ll eventually hit a threshold where stuff just can’t render fast enough to display properly. It’s the same with using meshes for sword swipes; you’ll get to a speed where you’re panning the texture too fast on the mesh for Unreal to keep up, and it starts to visibly artifact.
I can’t remember off the top of my head, but there’s a setup to use with the beam method so it pans and tiles the same amount regardless of how long the beam is. That keeps your bullet from stretching and speeding up if you shoot something far away or really close, so there’s no noticeable difference in the tracer regardless of what you’re shooting at