How to create trails?

Hi, does anyone know the best way in bmax to create speed/missile trails? I tried the ghosting method of redrawing the image while fading it but it's slow and looks crappy.

I think the best way would be to grow a tristrip behind it like the old blitz3d tron cycle demo but i don't know if that's possible while using the standard 2d bmax modes; i havn't seen any demo trying it.

You can use DrawPoly to draw a tristrip, or find the DrawTexturedPoly function somewhere on this forum to do it with textures.

I do it that way, and it looks fine. I create an emitter for each smoke element which scales/fades an image at a certain location, and then destroys itself when finished.

I am guessing you checked the following :
Special Effects
Making homing lazers with faiding tails
Sharp thruster trails
What code do you have that is too slow as it might be possible to optimise it?
It would be really useful to have an official, robust render-to-texture but, depending on the game, could you get away with a small drawimage/grabimage?