How do you make this kind of trail animation?
I cannot figure it out.
been working on it but my best atempt was this.
Well you are almost there, I think that you may be using a curve object for the thin part of the trail, and that you have used hooks to control its position, I have to guess because you did not post a blend file for me to look at… You may be using IK chains instead, I do not know.
This video looks a bit familiar, have you posted for this before, or was it someone else?
Anyway I can keep guessing at how you did this, or you can tell me, or post a blend file and then we can sort it out. If my assumptions are correct, you need to parent the targets for the ends of the trails to your ship so they spin with it rather than stay still in space. Then you need to build a “lag” into them so they follow a little behind the ship’s rotation. If I am wrong in my assumption, you need to tell me how you did this… The larger glow would be a mesh parented directly to the engine’s vectored thrust nozzle and you would use a Compositing Node setup to get the blur/fog/streaks, etc.
I know how I would do it, but we may differ and it’s best that we “sing off the same hymn sheet” as the old English saying goes.
Cheers, Clock.
OK, so I took a look and did some mods on a new layer - I have also switched to Cycles render, mainly for the trails as that is how I know best to do this sort of thing…
The Render. 
The Screen Layout in Compositing Mode. ;)
vehicles.blend (1.94 MB)
Your Blend File (seriously modded) 
Just press Play in the 3D view to see the animation, then change to Compositing setup to see the compositing nodes for the glows, etc. There are many things you may want to tweak here, but I can always answer any questions… This should get you on the right track anyway.
BTW - You have to do a full render to see the glows, they do not show in 3D Preview.
AND there are scripted expression drivers in there so you need to check “Autorun Python Scripts” in User Pref => File Tab.
Cheers, Clock.
I…I…Im scared.
Thankssssss bro!! it looks awesome!!
You’re welcome - there are things i would tweak given more time and I would like to have the “lag” of the trails behind the ship time-wise as an automatic thing, but I think that is only possible with Python Scripting - not something I will learn at my age!
So if anyone knows of a constraint whereby you could specify a delay in frames before the action starts…
So I could have a driver for the rotation of the trail control bones and have it kick in after say 20 frames - that would be awesome!!
Cheers, Clock.