I gave it a try, and saw some areas for improvement to meet my tastes. The following tweak of mine puts all emphasis on the appearance of one's own tracer smoke. As seen emanating from other planes, or generally from any view angle that departs much from end-on, the sparseness of particles is just awful. On balance, I still prefer the good old, simple 2D trail type tracer effect. But here goes with my fiddling, which is just one random guy's take on the matter...
First, and most important, the very low GasResist value of 0.05 had the smoke initially going *faster* than my plane, then slowing down so I could overtake it. This is very odd looking. Boosting GasResist to 0.3 has the smoke almost instantly slowing to the ambient air environment, which is much nearer to real behaviour.
Second, the almost constant size does not reflect the way the smoke expands in the turbulent wake of the projectile. I have settled on a roughly 5-fold increase in size.
Third, the essentially smoothly straight line of particles looks too neat. Adding some departure from the mean line of motion imparts an organic irregularity. I've increased the EmitTheta values to as large as perpendicular to the path (90 degrees), to readily obtain the desired departure. Because of my higher GasResist, and the concomitant much more rapid damping of velocity, I have had to also boost the EmitVelocity, which you had as a range of 0-2 and I make 4-8 m/s.
Fourth, Small values of Wind and VertAccel are of no use here, and so I make them zero.
Fifth, the opacity was a bit on the dense side for my taste, which is much augmented by the large number of particles. Especially nearer to the tracer itself, where the low GasResist caused the particles to bunch together before they had a chance to slow down. My preference is for a more uniform spacing and a smaller particle count (256/s vs 512), which makes for a better resultant uniformity in density of smoke.
Sixth, I toned down the brightness a bit, and made the color slightly bluish.
Seventh, I make the texture rotate twice (PsiN 2) during its 1 second live time. This add extra dynamicism in conjunction with the asymmetric texture.
I should point out that I cooked up a new texture that is asymmetric. It is offset from center, and has a notably brighter arc on one side. Here's a 256 pixel 'blow up'. You could screen capture this and resize it to 32X32 pixels. I've not refined this texture as far as I might wish; I got to a point where my idea of asymmetry being a help was confirmed, and stopped there.
Here's my TrailCurved.eff contents:
[ClassInfo]
ClassName TParticlesSystemParams
[General]
MatName ../TEXTURES/TrailCurved.mat
Color0 0.64 0.69 0.76 0.4
Color1 0.64 0.69 0.76 0.0
nParticles 256
FinishTime 1
MaxR 0.1
PhiN 0.3
PsiN 2
EmitFrq 256
EmitVelocity 4 8
EmitTheta 30 90
Wind 0
Size 0.25 1.2
GasResist 0.3
VertAccel 0
LiveTime 1
Rnd 0.3
Author
Topic: New Tracers Smoke (Read 2643 times)
