How to make Lightning flashes?????

Support Basics & Interface
1

:-? Can anyone suggest good ways to make lightning in Blender or even just fluttering light that looks like distant lightning???

Thanks a lot for the help…

Cujo31 :stuck_out_tongue:

2

if you make a lamp and go to the lamp buttons you can keyframe the energy level by pressing “i” over the buttonwindow. so you can make it go:

frame energy

1 0
2 5
3 0

3

Or try building a single line mesh (jaggedy shape of course). Toggle wireframe mode in the materials setting… Then you can go to the animbnuttons and instruct it to “build” the mesh over a few frames… or you can just keyframe the transparency levels to make it flash…

4

Distant lightning:
play around with animated world-setting colors. make the upper part (above the horizont) change color for two or three frames. Then activate “fog” to a proper value.

Lightning:
You’ll need a glow-effect for this. blender does not have any that’s why lightnings look somehow unreal. Also the lightning’s fractal-structure is not easy to model. I would suggest making some pic in photoshop - maybe a medical image of these tiny little veins in the eye will do as a rotoscope.

5

Then select all the verticies and use subdivide fractal 3 or 4 times.
Then set the material to a halo w/ lines.
If you have a very fast computer with lots of memory, duplicate the mesh and duplivert an omni-directional lamp to it, otherwise just put a lamp at the point of impact.

6

there are a number of ways, most of which have been mentioned by others. I just developed some very realistic lighting.

If you watch a lighting flash in slow motion that was taken by a high-speed camera, you will notice that the lighting is not just one big flash but a number of little flashes. The lightning also disitegrates into tiny balls of light that then fade out.

Halos are prefect for simulateing this. Make a jagged “bolt” mesh (I made mine by extrudeing a plane) and then do fractal subdivide quite a few times so that you can get some thickness to the halos. Over about 6 frames, mess with the halo size, big, nothing, medium, nothing, medium, fade to nothing. Copy this IPO and then paste it onto a hemi lamp and scale it so that the energy range is from 0 to about 3.

If the camera gets close enough to see the lighting hit, place a particle system that spews bluish vector particles. These are sparks. Make sure that they don’t last very long or they won’t look right.

Hope this helps!