Plexus/Constellation Trail (Paimon’s Trail)
Sooo I just started playing Genshin recently, and oh my goodness, this game is absolutely stunning in every way! One of the first things that caught my eye was Paimon’s Trail effect. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to try replicating it.
This was my result:
The effect is pretty straightforward. The only part that gave me some trouble was creating the “constellation/plexus.” At first, I thought about using a flipbook with different drawings of constellations, but then I stumbled upon Niels’ mini tutorial for plexus. It seemed really cool, but I struggled to follow along because, well, I’m not that experienced with scratch modules. Niels’ approach is intriguing, though I couldn’t quite replicate it. But I was determined to find a solution. After a few hours of trial and error, I figured out a much simpler way to achieve the effect.
Emitter
Just with one emitter rendering a sprite and a ribbon you achieve this.
One important thing to note is that you have to change the Tessellation mode to custom and then set the Max Factor to 1.
This creates a ribbon that connects the dots with just one segment. It’s also pretty cool to play around with other values.
Trail
The trail is quite simple. It’s just the same texture panned at different speeds and multiplied together, along with a dissolve mask on one side.
Texture
