Weapon trails in Maya

AGoodFella

Hey,

Does anyone know of a quick way to create weapon trails in Maya? I'm animating a hot with fast sword swipes and spins and I need a weapon trail.

I could make them out of simple polygons and toggle them off/on but I was wondering if there was a better way to do it or if there was a plugin out there.

Thanks.

throttlekitty

A hot, you say? Color me curious.

You might like something like this script, create an animated stand-in model and pull out curves from it to be lofted into a surface. Quick and easy!

AGoodFella

throttlekitty said:

A hot, you say? Color me curious.

You might like something like this script, create an animated stand-in model and pull out curves from it to be lofted into a surface. Quick and easy!

Haha, I meant to say shot.

Thanks for the script! I'll definitely check it out, looks like it will do the job. Cheers!

AGoodFella

@throttlekitty

Works for the most part. Do you think I can get something like this:

https://syncsketch.com/playground/739e548a1e8541efb1d91a2b475c88c9#195606

I would probably have to do some compositing and slight tweaking in After Effects but I'm wondering if I'm better off manually doing it. Especially for the part where the sword spins in midair after she throws it. The trails are animated and there seems to be a lot of hand animating on it.

Not sure.

throttlekitty

I'm not sure how they do it in games, to be honest, never done live fx. Some people create those ribbon meshes in realtime instead of pre-made, but that sounds like a nightmare. I assume there's a possiblity that the attacks can be interrupted or different attack chains, so what happens then?

It does look hand animated with that nearly cinematic flair. I see a mask or two moving around to control where and how much displacement. And the displacement looks to have a flow map for directionality. After flipping through the frames, I wonder if they don't have several trail meshes in slightly different shapes and just turn those on and off, while kicking off the mask slide? After the first catch into the backhand throw, you can see a new one pop in for the new motion.