Particle trails
Author
I need to produce some particle trails in OpenGL ES - do you have any suggestions on a good technique? I thought about just recording the positions of the particle as it moves and render smaller alpha'ed versions but that would introduce errors as they move faster.
draw a stretched quad orientated in the particle's moving direction, fade out the colors at the quads tail
p0,p1 are 2 positions, the pos + the direction its moved from
VEC3 q = cameras_position - p0;
VEC3 w = p1 - p0;
VEC3 n = return_VECTORS_normal( CROSSPRODUCT( q,w ) ) * width;
add+subtract n to the p0+p1 verts to get the 4 corners of the quad
p0,p1 are 2 positions, the pos + the direction its moved from
VEC3 q = cameras_position - p0;
VEC3 w = p1 - p0;
VEC3 n = return_VECTORS_normal( CROSSPRODUCT( q,w ) ) * width;
add+subtract n to the p0+p1 verts to get the 4 corners of the quad
Author
I thought about doing that but in my mind I have a vision of a longer trail which could be composes of the length of the particles travels but it would look angular.... I wanted something smoother.
If you want highest quality then you could store the previous N positions and string a quad strip along them with vertex colours to fade out the particle texture. That'd get you nice variable length trails which curve smoothly but it'd be a bit more expensive in terms of storage and poly count.
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