Here's how some Stylized Trails are done in Unity!

VFX_StylizedTrails_preview03_GIF


In this Unity tutorial we are going to see how to create Stylized Trails! We are going to use Shader Graph for a special shader and I will show you a quick technique in Krita to create tileable trails textures.

Hope you enjoy it!

https://youtu.be/wvK6MNlmCCE

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trail 2d has great potential that Unity needs to incorporate like much of the other trail extended features on the asset store

currently trying to ‘emit’ a flag trail without moving the emitter is VERY challenging and this really helps the idea of making a flame thrower.

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Yeah totally agreed! It’s a shame Unity doesn’t make some improvements to the original Trail Renderer, it would be awesome.

IIRC they are working on it, and have some beta ideas floating around
(thread @richardk mentioned a few months back but I can’t find it anymore)

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We actually have a few things going on with the TrailRenderer at the moment.

  • Static texture coordinates (yes we finally added it, in 2021.2)
  • Specify color/width per segment (instead of relying on the curve/gradient, hopefully coming in 2022.1)
  • Improvements to UV mapping (reducing distortion when width varies over the trail, hopefully coming in 2022)
  • A preview mode (like the Particle System has) in the Editor during Edit mode (aiming for 2022.1, too)

You’re welcome to tell us about other things that are important to you for the Trail Renderer, and we will evaluate it for future versions.

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Ty for reply; There was the link on the Unity forum that asks for feedback, vote_for_prioirty, to discuss these issues more and I’d like to be able to find it again.

Has anyone asked for CustomVertex streaming be applied to the trail renderer? Bc I see that as a great potential for the curves to pass through some fun shader operations.
being able to drive a flow map with the curves, vertex distortions and UV displacement all would be super powerful

I know many artists expected Shuriken’s trails/ribbons extended custom vertex streams to them.

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That’s great news! Glad to see there’s improvements being done to the Trail Renderer.

As long as the trail becomes smoother that’s already a win for me :stuck_out_tongue:

Good luck, looking forward to it.

That’s huge, hopefully these changes gonna make working with trails a bit less of a pain in the butt!
Thank you, looking forward trying it out! :slight_smile:

I wish I can like a comment more than once!

Please give us custom vertex streams for trails!

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We have actually finally added custom vertex streams for particle trails. In 2022.3 and newer.

Enjoy!

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Awsome! Thank you so much for your work! I’ll test it out whenever I got some time.

Nice! Thanks for the update, gotta test it out!