As compared to the work required in setting up the particle effects, polytrails are going to seem downright simple. Polytrails are short for polygon trails and that's basically what they are—a trail of polygons behind an object. We are going to use polytrails to highlight the wing tips of the spaceship. I know that there wouldn't be any atmospheric effects coming off of a spaceship, but it looks nice and we can pretend that it is space dust or something that gets trapped due to magnetic flux concentrations (I'm making this stuff up!).

Go to the Preview desktop and load the Polytrail Editor window alongside the Scene Viewer window. Create a polytrail by going to Polygon Trail | Create and name it ShipWingTips. Like the particle effects, it's best to experiment with these to get the result you want. The basic settings that we will use are shown in the following screenshot:

First, we increase the number of segments to 128 and set the Step value to 0.01 to give a smoother curve and then use Additive Blending to brighten the trail. By not setting a texture, we end up with a solid color for the polytrail, which is just fine in this case, but you could use polytrails for tire marks and such, so textures can be useful. The only other thing we will adjust is the lifetime so that the polytrail lasts longer—set Life Time to about 8.5.

We will apply it to the ship in the same way as we did to the particle effects, so open up the ship model and place helper objects at the end of the wing tips. Of course, it is easier to do one completely and then duplicate it and move it to the other side. As with the other helper objects on the ship, make sure the translation settings are as follows:

The translation is necessary so that it will move with the ship and the rotation makes the helper objects follow the ship when it turns. Next, make sure that the rotation is set to -90 on the y axis for the same reason as the rotation on the particle effects. Lastly, right-click on the helper object and select Attributes | Sfx | Add a Polygon Trail. That's it, now just update the scene with the new ship and take it for a test spin. The polytrails are not visible when in level flight because of the camera position, but they are easy to see in turns.