Single particle at head of a streaming emitter

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Single particle at head of a streaming emitter
by John Knowles on Mar 4, 2010 at 9:30:01 pm

I'm trying to create a photon torpedo like effect where a glowing particle has a streaking tail. I've made the tail portion easily enough, linking it to a moving light as the emitter. But creating a single particle to be the "head" that leads the tail has been difficult. I managed to create a single glowing sphere particle and link it to the same emitter, but when it spawns it's always offset from the actual position of the emitter. Is there any way to lock it to the exact emission point along it's motion path?

Examples:

Particle following emitter but offset:

Desired effect:

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Re: Single particle at head of a streaming emitter
by Mike Park on Mar 5, 2010 at 1:49:16 pm

Just a thought, why not just create a small precomp of the glowing particle, import it into your scene, scale it appropriately, set it to add, and then picwip it to your light position. It will be better for a number of reasons. First, you dont have any offset problems which are likely caused by the particle drifting from the emitter due to velocity, velocity from motion, gravity...any number of parameters. Next, you have the issue with the obscuration layer and the jagged edges which wont be a problem with this method, at least with the front particle. Now if you have trapcode lux, you could just throw up a black layer, apply lux, and set the layer to add and you would be done, assuming the particle doesnt go behind the person.

Hope this helps,

Mike

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