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Creating Lightning with Particles

  Published by Bart on February 23rd, 2006 in Tutorials

LightningFalgor explains how to create a convincing lightning effect by guiding a particle system along a curve guide and working on the particles' materials.

This tutorial was already mentioned in the Community Journal #3 but I think it deserves some extra attention. You'll find it on Falgor's website.



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7 Responses to “Creating Lightning with Particles”  

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  1. 1 Simon Edit Link Feb 23rd, 2006 at 7:29 am

    particles are so cool, and there is so much potential! I know since already one week how to make smoke, explosions and so on. awesomeeeee!!

  2. 2 VividHazE Edit Link Feb 24th, 2006 at 1:31 am

    Sweet! i've been wondering how lightning would be done within Blender for a while now, thanks for pointing it out B@rt! :)

  3. 3 Carl Edit Link Feb 24th, 2006 at 9:05 am

    Thanks for this tutorial! It was really good.

    I added a small bit - made the cloud texture affect the normal of the cloud plane too. Made the lighting look even more realistic, I think, since it makes the clouds look more 3-dimensional.

    Regards
    Carl

  4. 4 bart Edit Link Feb 26th, 2006 at 6:01 pm

    I've played a bit with this tutorial because I was thinking about how to realistically animate this. It turned out to be quite easy: add a properly sized lattice to the scene and parent the curve guide to it. Then, in editmove shift around the vertices and insert lattice keyframes. Make it nice and while, but keep the start- and endpoints fixed.

  5. 5 Midian Edit Link Sep 2nd, 2006 at 8:30 am

    for animation purposes, would it be more seemingly plausible to animate a fixed vertice along the curve guide with a simple particle effect to it, then quickly go from start to finish of the curve guide (though, i guess we'd be talking more along the lines of paths than modelling a particle flow with a curve guide) but with a long enough lifetime, the "died" function turned and some simple keyframed halo textures, i think you could make some pretty spot-on animated lightning

  6. 6 Midian Edit Link Sep 2nd, 2006 at 8:42 am

    and perhaps additive curve guides to the static images, to create that sharp arc, it would also allow i assume the ability to create multiple spikes of the lightning, i don't mean to take up so much space with my thoughts, and these are untested theories, but in a community such as blenders ideas should always be shared i feel, anyone willing to test any of my BS is welcome to show results, i may have to start on it in a couple days when i've the free time

  7. 7 BeBraw Edit Link Sep 28th, 2007 at 5:57 am

    As the tutorial does not seem to be available from the old location, you can use http://web.archive.org/web/20070304113340/http://koti.mbnet.fi/falgor/questroom/lightning/ instead.

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