when you say “trail” do you mean like you want these things to be following a path like “a line of ducks” or like “footprints in the snow/sand” then instead of each possible one of these being their own object (there is a practical amount of objects that should exist, and each one will add overhead to the Engine)
what you could do is hold them in an array (you can right click the variable in the “Variables” section which will convert it to an array) or you can hold lets say 5 of them separately as children Actors in the “Components Hierarchy” (using the “+Add” button) then you can manipulate their position through their transform.
for footprints you could be cycling through them where you keep shifting the one at the back to be at the start of the array. for the line of ducks you could go backwards through the array moving them toward the previous one in the array, and move the once closest to the object closer to the object itself.
if an Actor type thing shall be in the level, and you must get a a hold of it based on criteria then there are several ways to accomplish this:
- 'GetActorsOfType()` (just right click in an empty space and type “Get Actor” and it should be highlighted) this will return every actor in the current level, and in relatively random order so you will need to do extra steps/checks to make sure it is the one/ones you want.
- do a sphere trace/cast for Objects: (right click in empty space and type “sphere”) if this is going to be in VR then I would need a bit more on perspective as that can get special to visualize. you could also
SphereTracefrom an actors location
-keep in mind that a sphere trace/cast will return everything of the criteria in the radius in effectively random order. - you can also accomplish this with just a line trace especially where you are potentially using a pointing device anyways with VR (even if that pointing device is the camera itself)
- or some kind of manager where you have all the objects of the class register themselves; where the manager maintains the relevance of each one, and then you quarry the manager when you need them.
if these effects are not what you are looking for could you maybe show a picture (even like a story-board type thing) for what you are intending.