how to do lightning/thunder

[Is-boset]

i hear about a plugin called thor.
But what you wat to do? and animted scene? or a still? cause if you made a still you can modeled a spline and give it a map and effects. i guess i never try to do it

[RoarK]

i did this once b4, made some splines in the shape of a lightning bolt, checked renderable, animated the visibility of the splines to simulate lightning flashes and finally in video post gave it some bright blue glow. if u want u can animate the splines spreading or branching across to make it look more convincing.:surprised

[googlo]

yeah what raor said.

here's an example of arcing electricty I did about a year ago animating splines and applying glow to them. the sparks were done with particles in max too.

example (http://pweb.jps.net/%7Ebonavera/UltrashockLogoTonyStyleSparks.htm)

[omarello]

ohhhhh my good, GOOGLO thats exactly what i am looking for, cause i have like a logo for my band, and i just want to add those random lightining strikes between some letters and the logo it self.................

please please please tell me how u id this,..... i am really still a beginner..... the particles thing is not really importatn cause i am doing a still not an animation for now.....

can u give me like a beif step by step summary...

btw i am using max4.2

[BrandonD]

Try this...

It uses a renderable spline, NormalizeSpline modifier (www.max3dstuff.com), and Noise Modifier. Ideally you'd pass a soft-selection to the NoiseMod, but it looks like there's a bug in EditSpline that's not allowing this.

MAX5 file by the way...

[googlo]

Brandon,

It works with NURBS curves though :).

Omarello,

Basically what I did was make spline shapes in the shape of the arc electricity and then animated the vertices that made up those spline shapes, by hand :). It's subtle, but doing it by hand I had a little more control over how everything shaped and wiggled over time. Then, to get the splines to glow make them renderable, aplly and object id or material id (if you have a material on them) and use that ID with the glow effect.

Then lights were added into the scene at key points to mimick light giving off by the electricity and I made the lights fluctuate in intensity too to be in concert with the surging electricity.

Same thing with the sparks, I had lights located where they are popping out and animated their intensities to increase when the sparks would shoot out.

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