Blender Animated Light Trails Tutorial

oh hey guys how's it going so some people asked me to make a tutorial on how i made the light trails behind the corvette in a youtube test video that i posted um so i'm going to do that real quick i've tried this a bunch of times but it keeps taking too long so i'm going to try and do it real fast so we're going to add in a cube just to get the principle down real simple just subdivide it a bunch of times and then now we're going to select a few vertices that we want go to our vertex groups add in a new one assign it or we should call this emitter and assign it because this is where we want our particles to come out of so we go to our particle system we'll add a new one you can see that it's doing absolutely nothing so we're gonna work from the bottom up we're gonna go to vertex groups and select for the density that emitter that we want so now we can see from this little area it is emitting a particle perfect field weights we want to turn gravity down to zero because we don't want our particles falling towards the ground children we will come back to um then under render we will add in a little ecosphere right here we will add in oops not a particle system rather we'll just make a material for it material i already made a glowing one just emissive like 25 looks good move underneath so we don't see it because we don't want to see it in the render we just want to instance it so we go to particle settings under render halo set it as object and then select that icosphere so now you can see that our particle changed from a little halo to our icosphere now we want to increase the scale randomness to 100 just to input some randomness under velocity same thing as the field weights we want to turn that down to zero because we don't want our particle to have any motion we want it to spawn and sit there until it dies so to show this off a little bit we're just going to move this over adding in a empty and parenting our cube to said empty inserting and then making this spin just sort of sort of spins around a rotation point now as we can see we kind of have a trail it looks very bad so we're going to fix that we come over to our cube and on the particle settings first of all bump up those particles to like ten thousand you just add zero on the end um seed doesn't matter our frame start and frame end this is you only want to be the duration of your uh particle simulation um the longer this is the more particles you're going to need so since mine's only 50 frames long 10 000 will be perfect um lifetime i do not want to last the entire time i want them to only last about five frames at lifetime randomness you want to crank up so that you get a nice sort of bit of a taper at the end so now when we play it that's looking much more like a trail especially if we look at it from the top here looking pretty good so perfect that is how we make a trail the only issue um and also if you don't like how many sort of gaps are between here you want a more solid one that's where the children come in that's simplified um and it looks kind of janky because they only spawn in one plane of existence for whatever reason i'm not quite sure why but they do so what we can do about that is if we come down here to our size randomness first of all crank that again so we get a bit more variation as well as the roughness crank that all the way and it starts blending them together more and it looks just a lot better also we can come to clumping and add a positive clump and it will make them all clump up around the end giving us yet again a better taper you can see this more if in our particle settings we set it a longer lifetime about 10 and now we come back and see you get more of a taper there so pretty good not great if you make a smaller spawn area you will get better results however this is not as simple as it seems it worked very well on just individual objects that are parented and have motion however if you're working on something that is using constraints especially bone constraints you're putting this on an armature like for instance the car rig it breaks so if you're putting this on a character that's using a flaming sword if you want particles coming off your um light your tail lights it will not work and i will show you what i mean we come here we come to our corvette same thing i've set up just a few faces here as a vertex group and we're going to add it a little particle system same thing field weights down to zero for gravity our vertex group density we just want to be that group so see it's now spawning in the right location perfection um children will come back to render again object we'll just select our ecosphere perfect scale randomness all the way up velocity all the way down and then crank up the particle amount decrease the simulation time and decrease the lifetime and increase the lifetime randomness bunch of stuff but it's pretty simple now when we go down to cash and we have an animation built into this i probably should show that first under here it's just a simple goes from this end to the other end real simple animation just goes driving along very simple very easy so now we've got the particle system set back up you'd imagine that it would follow just like the cube however blender does not like bone constraints so we come in here and we just jump to the middle and it bunches them all up on every frame so if we go back a frame see the lights are there it spawns some particles next frame spawns more particles however if we look at our first example back over here although it's right here and we're just going through it's spawning particles in between each keyframe so right here to here spawns frame or spawns uh particles so the issue is with the bone constraint however there is a fix i didn't know about this before um before what i was doing is baking the animation coming in here baking the wheel rotation using the uh animation the car rig add-on baking all that it's free add-on if you don't know how to use it i can make a tutorial on that as well um but baking all that then coming to the object and going object animation bake action visual keying clear constraint clear parent blah blah blah and applying that and pretty much baking the car to only move as this cube is moving where it's no longer following the path it just happens to perfectly be following the path very convoluted very difficult to change after the fact like it's not procedural or dynamic at all which is very much my workflow i don't like baking things in that i cannot change afterwards so there is a solution however you just come down here come to your bone constraint disable it now still with the armature selected if you just come and add a regular constraint add in follow path select your bezier curve same thing fixed position follow curve animate and negative y now same thing come to the very first frame offset factor of zero go to the end offset factor of one insert perfect so now it's doing the same thing it's following the same curve and everything we are going to come and rebake our particle system boom and now when we play this back through come over here beautiful we have nice particles following as a trail which is fantastic and what's nice about this as well is that it does work with the controls of the car rig one thing it doesn't work with that you'll have to go back to your bone constraint is to bake the car steering and car rotation um but that's simple that's one very easy bake but it does work with drift and with elevation we come over here and it's now drifting out even though it's not following this path anymore we can see it's following the drift now there is a little bit of stepping which isn't great and you can see that quite clearly in my other corvette video but this is the best i can do with this system um but it's nice it does support the uh drifting option you can see here it's coming around not a very accurate drift at all but it does support it and using things like the children setting just again setting it to simple saying the randomized size up to one roughness to one and clump to one you kind of lose that stepping quite a bit it's still visible and it's still not great but it's definitely better than what it was but there is a system that beats all of this out and is much easier to do as well i will show you that now so to use this new system we do not use this one it works perfectly just with the um bone constraint come over here and re-enable this follow path um and actually we can even get rid of this particle system because it does not use particle systems at all there is a fantastic phenomenal add-on by calypsi i'm sorry if i'm mispronouncing that but it is great and it is called magic trails i have the pro version it's like five dollars i highly recommend you buy it however the free version does come with a lot of this as well so we can just add in a well i'm just gonna make a new collection for it because that's what i like to do a new short trail i find the gradient trail looks very nice especially for cars it comes with a whole bunch of ones like disco dot electric flame all this cool stuff um just press ok and this is our trail right here you literally just assign it where you want cursor to select oh sorry cursor rather and you can get a little bit of a glimpse about what this is going to look like just go in here rotate it down scale it to fit our size perfect parent it to the car here same thing add in a another trail same thing select the empty not the trail rotate it scale it and parent it and now when we play through animation we have light trails it's literally that simple now these i did in half a second so they don't look great but this is phenomenal you can come in here you can change this to be more of a red looking color you can add modifiers to them so you can add in some sort of solidify to make it actually have thickness as well which looks pretty nice yeah this is a fantastic add-on you can come in here and you can add in well actually if we just select the actual here we can add particle systems so we can add in a electric arcs here add in a particle system more electric arcs boom done as you can see here it just works super well like fantastically well i highly recommend to use this as opposed to using the particle systems because it's way less uh resource demanding um it's a lot more customizable um it's just really simple and you can support someone that made a great add-on and again the free version does support a lot of these same features however i do recommend just giving him a few dollars for this great add-on he says he's going to keep supporting it i've actually dm'd him on twitter seems like a great guy a lot of support and yeah there is some issues like i found like pressing ctrl z oh it works now okay so we must have fixed that i found that using it with car rigs pressing ctrl z or undoing um one of the bakes which is crash blender entirely but he seems to have fixed that so perfect see he's keeping updated he's adding more presets so the pixel trail is super cool here we just add that in um press ok here again we'll just take this bad boy parent it right to this right like that boom spin that around looks super cool it's also viewport so it kind of looks a bit janky but it when it's just rolling by here it looks great and best of all super customizable go in here boom now it's some sort of cool looking thing like that again great add-on i highly recommend to use this but the particle systems are there as well um this looks like it's still quite quite long but i hope that it answers your questions and also i highly recommend you use this system it is far better than the particle system and it looks much nicer as well very customizable uh you can also change the stiffness or if you're using a time offset one you can change the length of it um he does give some tips about keeping them within certain uh constraints however oh see there you go there's the issue pressing control z breaks it um so i guess it's the end of the tutorial guys um i hope you liked it let me know if you want to see anything else like my anime tune shader or how to use that car rigging add-on i'm assuming you already know if you're asking how to make light trails for cars but if not let me know yeah thanks for watching

Channel: Fin

Views: 4,122

Keywords: blender, 3d, tutorial, cars, light, trails, light trails, cool, render, blender tutorial, simple, hard, easy, review, addon

Id: vV1OITItcBw

Length: 14min 36sec (876 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 09 2021