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Abava Bava
04-24-2006, 11:44 PM
I will do my best to explain my situation. I have a rendered terrain and cam movement about 3 seconds long. I used a mask in AE to do a sky replacement. I created storm clouds in PS and put this into the AE comp. I have 2 clouds one in front of the other. I wish to have lighning flash in between the clouds(SO it apears to be in the storm cloud). What is the best way to accomplish this? I just added the lightning effect to the back cloud so there would be one storm cloud in front. Do i need to use a solid or matte. I really dont know about using solids to create stuff. I also want the lightning to enter at 20 frames and leave at 28 frames and because its effecting my actual cloud layer i cant just stop the effect. Any help would be great thanks

My second question is someone mentioned to me when using combustion that when they need to make rain the best way to show depth is to make a few layers and if you focus in teh scene is upfront then making the rain upfront sharper and blurring the rain in the background. This sounds great but in AE how can I acheieve this.
DLangley
04-25-2006, 12:06 PM
Are you using advanced lightnng? If so, to control when the lightning comes on, in the effect controls twirl down core settings and glow settings, set the opacity of both of these to 0 at time 0 and toggle on hold keyframes. Move the current time indicator to 20 frames and set the opacity back up to where you want it. Then move to 28 frames and set the opacity back to 0.

By "appears to be in the cloud" do you mean you want the lightning to strike from between the 2 storm clouds or be within the storm clouds as if the clouds were one?

Although I haven't used it, Particular is propbaly the best choice for making rain, otherwise a quick and dirty for rain is CC Rain, apply it to a black solid and set the blending mode to add or screen then create duplictes of this and add fast blur as needed. You could set the solids to be 3D layers and move them along the z axis to help give depth. Make the solid larger than the comp size so you can shift layer position so the rain on one layer doesn't sit exactly on top of rain on another. You could also apply the wiggle expression to whatever rain properties you want to acheive randomness.
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