Creating Bullet Trail in Cycles

Question

Hey People how do they create this Trail Behind the Bullet in particular games where a slow motion effect is shown.

score 4 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 10 '20 at 12:57

Its created by vector-displacing pixels in post-production. The game engine does this with pixel shaders in post-production too.

You just don't need a particle simulation for the trail but a single texture behind the bullet will do.

This will create a spherical ball-like distorsion:

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Smear it and adjust it in your favourite 2D application to create some water-like wave effect.

Red channel affects the X position
Green channel affects the Y position
Pixel value of 0.5 is no change, brighter is positive direction, darker is negative
Leave blue channel black

You can also sculpt the effect on a plane and bake it into a normal map. Then erase the blue channel from that map.

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