Magic Trails

Magic Trails is a Blender plugin for creating realtime trail effects for weapons, characters, props and environments. Ease-of-use and customizability are key.

What this is for:

Trail effects usually take a lot of time to setup and require a lot of maintenance. Different builtin methods are either not very flexible or require cloth simulation, animation baking or other hacks to work. Magic Trails takes care of everything. Trails are calculated in realtime, meaning all you need to do is create the motion for the trail controller or parent it to an already animated prop. The simulation is very fast and intuitive and can be baked once satisfied with the result in an instant. Although you are able to create your own trail materials, the addon comes with preset ones that cover a lot of scenarios like simple gradients, smears, fire, lightning ect. 

Pro Features:

Fast realtime calculation and an effortless baking process allows you to have maximum control over the simulation.

Use and modify preset trail materials to fit your context or invent new trails using the presets as a template.

Use Trail Followers to create secondary motion and gain access to realtime velocity capture for advanced animation and rigging.

Use mesh modifiers on the trail mesh to create unique shapes and variations of the original trail mesh.

Keep track of all your magic trails components in the addon panel and manage, delete, add new components in an instant.

New in 2.3.0:

• Complete overhaul of the simulation setup and calculation
• Customizable trail length
• Brand-new UI with intuitive settings and quick access to the most important features and options
• Faster and more robust baking for rendering and export
• New trail component "Follower" with various motion models for advanced animation