A trail/ribbon renderer for Godot similar to Unity's TrailRenderer component
This is an implementation of trail/ribbon renderer similar to that in Unity. It can be used to give an emphasized feeling of motion to a moving object, or to highlight the path or position of moving objects. It also comes with a LineRenderer which is actually what's used by the TrailRenderer to draw the trail. Note that this plugin only supports 3D.
- Variable width with curve
- Variable color with gradient
- Different alignment modes
- Texture modes (tiling, stretching)
Clone this repo:
git clone https://github.com/Hyrdaboo/TrailRenderer/
If you don't have git you can also download zip by clicking Code>Download ZIP
- After completing the installation, navigate to the downloaded files, and you will find the addons folder.
- Drag and drop this folder into your project.
- If your project already has an addons folder then drag and drop the contents of the addons folder into your existing one.
You will also need this input configuration if you want to check out the demo:
Simply create a new Node3D and add a TrailRenderer script to it. You can move this object in your game either from code or parenting it to another object(whatever you wish) and it will draw a trail behind it. You can also change the parameters you set in the inspector from code.
- Lifetime: Define lifetime of points of the trail in seconds
- Min Vertex Distance: The minimum distance between points in the trail, in world units.
- Emitting: When this is enabled new points are being added to the trail. Use this to pause/unpause the trail.
- Curve: Control the width of the trail along its length using a curve
- Alignment: Set the direction that the trail faces.
- View: The trail faces the camera
- TransformZ: The trail faces the Z axis of its GlobalBasis
- Static: Every quad in the trail face the Z axis of the object's GlobalBasis when the point was emitted
- World Space: Sets whether the trail is emitted in world space or relative to the object its emitted from ( I recommend leaving this on)
- Material: Material override used by the trail
- Cast Shadows: Set the shadow casting mode for the trail mesh
- Color Gradient: Define a gradient to control the color of the trail along its length. (You need to enable Material>Vertex Color>Use As Albedo for this to work)
- Texture Mode: Control how the Texture is applied to the trail.
- Stretch: Map the texture once along the entire length of the trail.
- Tile: Repeat the texture along the trail, based on its length in world units. Use the material UV1 to change the tiling rate.
- Per Segment: Repeat the texture along the trail, repeating at a rate of once per trail segment.
Note
Trail renderer specific parameters are defined in the TrailRenderer category and the things related to the way trail is drawn are in the LineRenderer category
While this plugin tries to replicate unity it's not perfect. There are a few bugs and glitches here and there and I haven't really tested its performance.