Render Line Trailing Player

This topic is so elusive to me that I’m not even sure how to title this question. Anyways, as with the game “Sunset OverDrive” where there’s some line/texture following the player, or with the new game Jumpiter Jump on the iOS market, I often see things trailing the player. I’m pretty much just wondering how this is done? Documentation? Links to tutorials? Strange approaches? Black magic?

If anybody can shed any light on the topic, feel free to do so in this thread. Like I said, the concept of what it is is so elusive that I don’t even know how to properly ask what it is I want to learn, much less where to go to learn it.

Here’s an image to help you get the idea of what I’m looking to look into:

alt text

That video has similar information, but I wouldn't want to instantiate and destroy particles over and over to achieve this effect, due to performance issues.

You might want to take a look into the LineRenderer class.

The manual

The Scripting API

It works with an array of Vector3, representing your line path.

While writing up this question, I ACCIDENTALLY used the word “trail” and I started researching that and found this video: Animate a line draw using Line Renderer Component - YouTube

So there we go! that’s the basics of this stuff lol, sorry if this is all filler, but maybe someone is as curious as I am. I’ll leave it up, but this can be closed or deleted depending on who cares.

I’ve used a particle system to achieve a similar effect. These are relatively optimised and take care of themselves. Run fine on a PC until you get several thousand particles with collision detection.