Trail objects are great, but something that would make them even more useful is a way to have them move relative to a frame of reference.
One of the most common use cases for a Trail is to create a convincing cartoony sword slash. This is pretty easy: just turn the Trail on during an animation and then turn it off after. A nice effect. However, it only looks the way you (may) want it to when you’re standing still. If you are moving when the Trail activates, it lags behind your character in a (circumstantially) undesirable way. This is where a frame of reference property would be helpful.
You can set this property to a Part or Attachment (a 3D transform, essentially), and the quads of the Trail will move with it. If the part moves, the Trail moves. If the part rotates, the Trail rotates around it. This relieves the above use case by setting the frame of reference to the HumanoidRootPart. The Trail will always have that perfect cut through the air, regardless of whether or not the character is moving.
If the property is nil, the extant behavior is preserved.
Kind of, except in this case you would presumably be locking the trail to a part other than the one it is attached to. The main use case is to get trail visibility from a character’s animations but not the character’s movement.
This still does not exist, even though it’s really useful, and without it, some effects are downright impossible.
In my case, I have a spinning trail over a moving part, the trail’s motion will not be circular but rather a cycloid, due to the velocity inheritance. A RelativeToPart property, that did things in the object space of a part, would make this possible.
Another post expressed their need for this, with a very good example.
I honestly would love this and I think we need this.
being able to “anchor” or “weld” a trail to the HumanoidRootPart of an humanoid so we can make sword swooshing and sweeping motions look just right.