Trails tab
The band of light that follows the coin. A trail is not a particle system: it is a glow drawn along the path the coin has just travelled, so it always sits exactly on the route.
Up to four layers, each with its own picture, colour and shape. Layers stack, and stacking is how good trails are made: a wide soft glow underneath, a tight bright core on top.
[trails_01 - The Trails tab, panel width, with one layer card expanded showing the Look group: Render, Rotate to path, Emit from, Trail length, Samples. Red box around Trail length and Samples together.]
The picture, Transform, blend mode, opacity, tint and the over-life curves are the shared controls, explained in Controls you meet everywhere. This page is the parts that only trails have.
Shape of the trail
Render - Sprites draws one copy of the picture at each sample point, the classic beaded trail. Ribbon draws one continuous strip through the same points.
Sprites for a soft glow made of overlapping blobs. Ribbon for a clean, solid stroke like a brush line or a neon tube.
In Ribbon mode the strip's width follows Size over life and its fade follows Opacity over life. An uploaded picture becomes the strip, with its left edge at the head.
Rotate to path - turns each glow sample to face its own direction of travel, so a streak-shaped picture follows the curve instead of pointing one way.
Sprites only. Ribbons are always aligned - that is what a ribbon is.
Trail length - how far behind the coin the glow stays visible, as a share of the flight.
0.15 is a tight comet tail. 0.5 is a long sweep. 1.0 covers the whole route and reads more like a drawn line than a trail.
Samples - how many copies of the picture are spread along the trail, or how many points the ribbon bends through.
In Sprites mode, raise it until the beads stop being visible as separate blobs, then stop. In Ribbon mode, raise it until the curve stops looking faceted.
This is the main cost of a trail. Four layers at 80 samples is 320 pictures drawn every frame, per flight. If the preview stutters during Launch All, this is the first number to bring down.
Emit from - where the trail is born: the coin's centre, or one of the rim emitters from the Coin tab.
Two layers from two opposite emitters on a spinning coin gives a double helix for free.
Draw above the coin - draws this layer in front of the coin instead of behind it.
Colours per target
At the bottom of the tab there is a folded section, Target colors and glow overrides, with one row per pot.
Trail colour (one per target) - the colour a layer uses when its Tint by target is on. White means no change.
Set gold, blue and red for your three pots, switch Tint by target / line colour on in one layer, and that single layer now flies in the right colour for whichever pot the coin is heading to.
This is not the pot colour on the Board tab. That one only colours the circle on the board; this one colours the effect.
Glow override (one per target) - upload a different glow picture for one specific target.
An uploaded picture is used untinted by default, so its own colours survive. If you want to tint it anyway, switch on Whiten image before tinting in the layer - otherwise the tint multiplies with the picture's colours and usually goes muddy or black.
Variation
The folded Variation group above the cards makes each flight slightly different: with trails it varies the size and the length by up to a quarter of the amount you set.
A recipe that always works. Layer 1: the bundled glow, Add blend, size about 1.5, opacity 0.5, trail length 0.4 - the soft halo. Layer 2: the same picture, Add blend, size 0.5, opacity 1, trail length 0.2 - the bright core. Two layers, and the trail suddenly has depth instead of being one flat smear.
[trails_02 - Stage only, about 1200 px, three crops side by side of the same flight: left = wide soft layer alone, middle = tight bright core alone, right = both together. Caption bars: "halo", "core", "both".]