Star trek text 'tracer' effect?

[Radamand]

I know this is kind of a loaded question, and that it would probably require an entire tutorial, but can someone show me how to create Star Trek TNG's 'tracer' like effect as in the screenshot?

[LoudSilence]

Try out Pyrochild's Trail Plugin

I used that to make something similar, kind of hard to explain the steps though

Edited September 11, 2020 by LoudSilence

[MJW]

I don't think Trails will do it, since it won't converge.  Vanishing Trails is closer, but as it is now, very close spacing leads to not much fading, even at maximum fade. I may have to think about whether there's some reasonably easy way to provide the option of greater transparency.

 

What works fairly well is to duplicate the image into a new lower layer, reduce the opacity in the new layer quite a bit with BoltBait's Transparency adjustment, then run Vanishing Trails on that. The upper layer makes the first level text full opaque, while the lower layer provides the quickly-fading trail. Some of the effects in the original image would be hard for a plugin to do automatically. Perhaps using BoltBait's Paste Alpha plugin to modulate the lower layer's alpha with some Cloud pattern before applying Vanishing Trials might produce something similar (or perhaps it wouldn't).

[Reptillian]

Theoretically, a transformation from rectangular projection to regular, filter value in between, then transform right back could do the job. Here's the problem, it is computationally intensive if you want to minimize on data loss. I have already made codes to do this, so this thing will be feasible.

Edited September 11, 2020 by Reptillian

[Djisves]

Try the Point Blur plugin.

 

[MJW]

I'd never heard of the Point Blur plugin. It seems very useful.

[lynxster4]

Me, either.  Probably because it's archived.  Thanks @Djisves! 

 

[LoudSilence]

I installed Point blur but it wont show up (i searched for it in scriptlab too)

i would post this on that thread but its archived

[MJW]

I downloaded it, and it installed correctly in the Effects>Blur menu. However, I'm not sure it works entirely correctly. The blur didn't look quite right to me.

[LoudSilence]

[AndrewDavid]

 

@LoudSilence What shows in your effects folder?

[LoudSilence]

@AndrewDavidOh, that was it thanks, I had just put the zip file with the dll in it instead of the actual dll on accident

[MJW]

I have a new version of Vanishing Trails which can produce a closer approximation of the Star Trek text.

[Djisves]

31 minutes ago, MJW said:

...a new version of Vanishing Trails...

The best thing that came out of this topic and the OP's question.

[AndrewDavid]

 

Vanishing Trails, 5 Layers, Point Blur and Bi-Directional blur if @Radamand returns

[LoudSilence]

Impressive!

[BoltBait]

Here's my try:

 

 

I made the text on it's own layer, then duplicated that layer.

 

Next, on the middle text layer, I applied a render of clouds to it to give the text more variance.

 

NOTE: I had to copy the alpha from the text layer back to the middle text layer as the Clouds render lost my alpha.

 

Then, I used Point Blur (as others have used above) to make the trails.  This looked good, but I didn't think it was prominent enough, so I duplicated the layer and merged down the duplicate into the copy.  You can then adjust the alpha of the trail layer to taste. 

 

Finally, I added a simple starfield to the black background by adding noise (settings shown above).  I highlighted a one quarter of the starfield and stretched it to fill the entire image, then repeated the add noise effect.  This gave me stars of various sizes.

 

OK, this isn't a perfect simulation of the original, but it's a quick hack that's probably close enough for whatever you're doing.