Particle trails can be slow and inefficient in Houdini. While tinkering, Danil Krivoruchko found a way to create a particle trail effect completely in VEX. Danil walks though creating the particle trail effect in VEX in great detail.

If you are unfamiliar with Houdini, VEX Operators let you string together code by connecting nodes. VEX evaluation is typically efficient, getting you close to compiled C/C++ code’s performance. VEX isn’t meant to be an alternative to scripting. It is meant to be a smaller and more efficient general purpose language for writing shaders and custom nodes.

You can also download the source file for the scene, so you can see how ti was put together, by taking it apart.