Making a bullet trail

[LazyCoder]

Hi, I'm trying to make a bullet trial not unlike the sniper rifle's bullet trail in Halo. I thought of using lightning, but how can I customize it to make it look right?

Does anyone have any other suggestions?

 

[Anachron]

Could you please elaborate what you are trying to do?
Making a model?
Making a spell?!

 

[LazyCoder]

It'll be activated through triggers, so really anything.

I'm just trying to make a bullet trail that will:
- Go from point a to point b (and be able to be moved at the bullet won't be instant hitting, I'll need to draw the trail from its starting point to wherever the bullet is now)
- Fade like the trail in halo
- OPTIONAL - Sort of dissipate and distort like the trail in halo (instead of staying perfectly straight)

For example, I was thinking of doing this with a custom model that's a plane of size 1x1 with all of it to one side of the origin so I'd just scale it and set the rotation, but I can't do that because warcraft 3 decided to make it so you HAVE to scale uniformly, despite the fact that there are separate controls for scaleX, scaleY, and scaleZ, everything just usese scaleX.

 

[Damage]

Use a Ribbon effect and make it move very very fast from point A to B, that should leave behind a smooth trail. Lightning Effects get stretched and distorted over long distances, and as you say, models get crappy scaling.

As such, use a blank model with just a thin ribbon and make it move.

An example of such effect is in the Water Elemental Projectile. There's a particle effect on the head of the missile, followed by a ribbon placed behind it to give that "trail of water" type effect.

 

[LazyCoder]

Cool that works. Just one minor problem: the ribbon effect doesn't start until quite a ways in front of the unit. I'm basing this off of the glaive projectile, I just removed the model.

 

[LazyCoder]

Ok this works for the slower moving projectiles, but not for the sniper rifle which has an instant hitting shot. I just want to draw a line from the start point to the end point and have it fade away.