Animated Lightning Test

[RenderTITAN]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying for some realistic lightning to be used as a backdrop for some greenscreen footage I shot. The sheet lightning I'm quite pleased with - I studied some video of thunderstorms to get an idea of how it (lightning) behaves. Do you think it looks realistic? Any ideas to make it better?

Here's the link:

http://www.bakersvideo.com/LightningAnimated.mov (http://www.bakersvideo.com/LightningAnimated.mov)

Scene details: 4 point lights, 1 spectral cloud layer, 3hrs 27mins render time at 384x288, Vue6.6 used

Feedback greatfully received as I want to get this as good as possible before embarking on the mammoth render at full PAL resolution. I am pretty much a Vue newbie so no doubt there's loads of things I can improve on.

TIA :-)




The biggest issue is what does teh green screen look like? Part of teh "realistic" effect is that it has to match the live action plate. The action of the lighting looks great but it seems to have a distintive "look" (Colors and depth) are not what I wouldn't call realistic. Usually, backgrounds like that would suffer from DOF. Also, for a storm look, I would have more variation ins the tones of the clouds. Finally, I also think that the stormmy look usually gets the dark and night looks... So we are back to what the live action plate looks like and what do you want...

I hope this helps.
M

[HarryHotspur]

The footage was shot in the evening in overcast conditions. I was planning on doing some colour correction to the footage to help make it match, plus add some lighting and flicker within AE as well.

Sorry I should have said that I am going for a sci-fi look so ultra-realism is not important for this shot - apart from the lightning affecting the clouds, I want that bit to look realistic

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