Hi everybody,
I am working on a project and i don’t know how I could do the lightning, more precisely, animated flashes with several flashes generated by an object (like in star wars movies).
As far as i am novice in that field, every detailed information would help me very much. I would be interested by creating it with moving curves and /or particles.
I think you are best off modeling the lightning by hand on top of a lightning photo (path).
Then apply a bright glowing shadeless/halo material on it, maybe add some lights along the lightning model to simulate the dlasg.
Then animate it by hand. Just my opinion.
I am interested in writing a lightning generator, but probably wont have time for that right now.
There are lightning tutorials (see the 2nd last page of tutorials request thread).
Yeah, thank you for your advice.
But is it possible to randomize easily the animation of the lightning? Animating it by hand is impossible because of the high number of flashes.
What you could animate is displacement map and/or rotation. That way you could get variable shape (even if the morphology wont really change)… Just a quick idea, havent tried that yet.
That’s a good idea! I’ll test that with marble textures. And I have an other idea, perhaps I could do that with fractal but I haven’t test yet.