I'm trying to get a simple particle setup to create trails. I can easily do this with the polywire node, but not with trails
I attached a snapshot of my network view. Inside the popnet there is a source node only. The sphere are correctly being mapped to the particles using the copy node, but the trails don't seem to want to come out. Do I need to convert the output of the copy node?

Thanks
Alex

Hi,

Digital Tutors has a free videotutorial showing how to achieve the particle trails effect.

Cheers,
Greg

I think this is what's happening, but I'm not sure:

The trail SOP does create new geometry but it has exactly the same position as the original one. After you copy your spheres onto the points you create a new piece of geometry. If you animate that geometry with a transform SOP and then append a trail SOP you should be able to see trails.

Make sure the sphere is a polygon, and also that you have display points checked when looking at the Trail SOP.

Also you will need to increase the cache size if you want trails longer than 2 frames.

And use “Connect as Polygons” on the Trail SOP.

This may or may not be the effect you're after. But it works for me.

Hmm, the connect as polygons seems to work, but seems very haphazard. If you look at the screen grab attached, what I did was add a transform with a sin() expression in the x rotation channel, and then made the trail's cache size 10 and gave it a length of 100.

Only some of the spheres seem to be creating trails, and enabling “connect as polygons” hides the spheres.
I'll look through the Digital Tutors site, I'm definitely missing something

Thanks
Alex

I think I figured it out, I had to reset the cache a couple of times and extend the particle trail and cache size A LOT to get this to work. Would be a good tutorial subject

Thanks
Alex