I want to recreate this kind of fluctuating trail effect, it begins fairly smooth at first and displacement increases overtime.
Previously, I’ve used Roblox’s trails, but they can’t fluctuate. I’ve thought about creating new beams or trails and attachments periodically in the workspace and using bezier curves to connect them, but that’s probably very costly for performance. I just have no idea where to start with this.
Why wouldn’t that work? I’m confused. You can code the particle emitter to change dependent on different things. Transparency, enabled, spread, etc. You could also tween the attachment position/offset you place the particle emitter under in the hierarchy tree/object browser via a script.
If you mean “displacement” as in the wavey effect, like shown on the left of this image:
Then, that ‘wavey-ness’ is caused from the movement of the object(plane) itself. That’s what it seems like anyway- if the plane turns, then the particle attached will as well.
You may or may not be aware of these recourses:
It proves that you can program wind effects yourself, but it takes work/programming knowledge. Maybe that helps, maybe it doesn’t. 
Trails actually can’t get the desired result in this case because each segment of the trail stays in place after being emitted, whereas the wing tip vortices appear increasingly wavey over time. The wavey effect is not because of the plane’s movement, and I say that with 100% certainty because the video was taken from War Thunder right after the wing vortex was updated. Previously, War Thunder developers used a method similar to Roblox’s trails, and it did not appear wavey like this.
Essentially, the ultimate goal is to have something similar to the trail effect, but with each segment being displaced in the direction normal the the wing’s direction of travel.
The wind effects you shared are very interesting, but notice that those wind effects don’t really move, like a standing wave whereas I’m trying to make a regular dissipating tranverse wave (that could be a really good analogy or it just makes things more confusing, idk)
A waterfall would be like a standing wave, although there’s no wave, because the water is moving, but the shape of the waterfall as a whole is not.
In this picture you can see that the vortex comes off fairly smooth and then transforms into this zig zag pattern. Because it’s moving, it’s a vortex.
What it looks like using trails:
My first reaction was to continue using trails, but instead of connecting them to the wing tips, you will have to first create an invisible hinge constraint (or even ball constraint, or rope constraint, any of these will work) that allows the trails to swivel in a small space around that connection point… creating a random free moving attachment from which the trail will emit, rather than the wing tip which doesn’t move. Is this enough to give you an idea, or do you need me to flush this out some more?
I know what you mean. But I think you forgot that trail segments cannot move after they’ve been created. The trail works by recording past positions of the attachments and bridging between the recorded positions from different frames. So directly manipulating the position of the trail’s attachments will not create motion. Once again, trails do not move, they only trace past positions. Trails are out of the question.
I have created what I described in my last post… to show you what i mean… i replaced one of my hovercraft trails with a red trail to demonstrate how the trail can have movement… I created a rope constraint to an invisible part that dangles from the back of the hovercraft… i didnt play with it much, just to show you the idea, it can be worked much better. Keep in mind my white trails were already there, connected to the moving rotor, but the red trail is what I am referring to, as its connected to a dangling invisible part:
What you’re showing me is exactly what I had described. As I’ve said, the trail isn’t moving, you’re just moving the attachment around. This is not the desired effect as the curve formed by trail segments stay still in the air.
I finally decided to actually make it myself instead. I used beams and connected each successive beam to the attachment of the previous one and then tweened the position of the attachment to a randomly generated vector3 value.
With some tuning of the interval length, fade time, amplitude, and applying a proper texture, I can probably make it look very realistic.
Ahh i see what you mean now… you want it like its being affected by wind current. This effect is only really noticeable if the camera is stationary. Glad you were able to recreate though! It looks great!
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