Bullet or contrail effects

I’m looking at maybe a quad or trail that has two intersection polygons. Should the be a component or a draw able? I am going to use this with RayCasting.

Examples:

1280×720

1411×762

800×450

Look at the 44_RibbonTrail Demo. It’s pretty simple for projectiles at least.

Search for laser beam

Okay. I did see the laser thread in the past.

You’ll probably want your 3DLine to be a simplified RibbonTrail.

Unlike my beamlight…

I looked at the ribbon trail example. All I’m looking for is really a way to create a intersecting quad this helps keep the effect from looking flat. So create one end of the quad at the gun barrel position then raycast and if a hit is detected draw the other end of the polygon to that location. Maybe even add a texture to the quad for the tail effect like the pics above.

If that’s the case why not just make it in blender (or whatever modeling program you use) and then rotate and scale the geometry accordingly?

If I have a texture mapped to the quad. Then scale it in the forward direction wont this screw the uvs up?

It depends on the texture. If the texture is meant to wrap along the length of the laser every 1 meter or the like them yes, but if the texture is meant to scale along it (e.g. If the texture doesn’t change with the length direction) then no.

With custom geometry you could fade out the start and end individually, together with a traveling texture by setting the vertex colors and UVs accordingly during the batch update.

So do you guys think I should modify RibbionTrail or make a custom geometry.

@SirNate0 This method will work for my bullet contrails. They just use a gradient texture like in the laser post thread.