Trail Snail

My main goal this week was to get the trail shape working and making it procedural. The video below show the trail emitting from a translating, rotating box.. The trails shape is determined by a colour ramp in the POPnet as mentioned in a previous post..

The trails are created by emitting a particle every FPS which is given a dynamic colour according to $LIFE. The trail length is then defined using a delete by range function, which relates to the npoints of the original geometry. This is then passed into a ForEach node (powerful node), which creates a line along each stream. The tricky bit was to get them not to draw a line connecting the other trails, cheers Phil for your help on this one. After the ForEach a Sweep is used to copy a circle onto every point in the trail. The scaling values are added by a PrimativeSOP, which then is Skinned. The Skinning needs to be set up to skin every nth value, in this case it relates to the total number of points in the original geometry.. And heres the video to show you the result..