Tracer Effect in Maya

There is people ask if we can have tracer effect like GhostTrials plugin in 3Ds Max, the awser is YES! We can just use Animation Sweep function in Maya  and got result like here.

Here are steps:

1. Create a curve and animate it, or parent it with an animate object
2. Pick Curve and apply “Create Animated Sweep” function, will get a full tracer alone with your motion. Note, the command may place on different menu depends on Maya version.
3. If we want a short piece trace follow the object movement, you can select “snapshot1Group” node and select “snapshot1” in it’s channel box.
4. Now you can play with “Start Time” and “End Time” with set keyframe on them!In this example I set 5 frame gap between Start and End, to get a 5 frame length tracer, bigger gap, longer tracer.
5. Here’s the result

Plus, you can change shape of Curve itself by set keyframe on it’s CV points, to get more interesting effect like this.

Enjoy yourself!

Thanks!