Laplacian Lightning Generator Blender 2.5
Do you need a Lightning generator? Too complex? Then you should check out this new cool Add-on for Blender 2.5 called The Laplacian Lightning Generator .
It is a Blender addon to help in creating lightning and electrical effects. Though the script cannot yet create those beautiful ‘dancing-arcs’, it can create decent looking lightning in a reasonable amount of time with a good amount of user-control. The generator simulates real physical effects and can be used for Laplacian phenomenon beyond lightning.
The script is still very much in development but the most recent release provides much needed functionality including ‘container insulators’, which allow ‘lightning in a bottle’ effects.
UPDATED – 06.20.11 – v0.2.6
FIXES:
-Moderate speedup.
-Cubes output scale/loc corrected.
-Tooltips added.
NEW FEATURES:
-Container insulators: Arbitrary mesh shapes can be used as insulator/cloud objects. Still quite imperfect though. May slow down generation. Best for simple containers; bowl, cup, bottle. A spiral pipe would not work well. Must have rot=0, scale=1, and origin set to geometry.
-Mesh origin objects:. If the origin obj is a mesh, vert locations will be used as initial charges. However this will disable multi-mesh output. May slow down generation.
Addon script, instructions, and demo’s available here:
More Information, Blend file and Add-on Script:
http://www.funkboxing.com/wordpress/?p=301
Cooool.
looks cool i try it out.
SWEEET
oh and hi Colin
Nice.
I think I will use this script. This could be quite useful.
Thanks to the developer of this script.
PS: What would be really handy, is if someone came up with a build of Blender with all scripts, plugins, materials and renderer’s preinstalled as part of the installation procress. Just a thought.
great for technical direction
Is there a problem with Specular mapping in 2.56b; ‘cos I can,t get it to work at all. Perhaps a bright spark would help? —Do I have to use certain grays and why have h,t I got the same buttons as in the tutorials?
@ Nemesis
check Graphicall.org plz
Now, if we could just harness this power, feed it directly into the flux capacitor…
…its what makes time travel possible!
(I think we may have solved our world energy crisis! Dang, is there anything Blender cannot do?!?)
:-)
I like to here that
Great! To be frank lightning was the only “effect” that blender couldn’t simulate.
awesome!!!
Very nice. :)
I believe this is the same algorithm used for electricity in Halo Reach? Nifty stuff.
This made me google laplace and spend an hour learning what laplace transformations are. They’re pretty cool. Also, this addon is awesome :)
hmmm yet another tool in the toolbox. this is great. i’d always figured that lightning was just added in post with mattes. now we can animate the lightning do slow-mo and time freeze shots and the obligatory ‘lightning in jello-y plasma’ that’s used in effects shots like harry potter-esque films.
kudos!
@ Cedal,
Thanks. I had forgot about them:)
Wow, this stormy effect is very useful for me! Gratz!
Always wanted to be able to use blender to generate after effects style lightning overlays looks like this is the tool
I did not like it. It looked fake. BlenderGuru produces way better result. No offense. Andrew’s just looks way better.
I’d like to use this but in Blender 2.57 and 2.58 I can’t get to the preferences window, it just keeps crashing. Does anyone know how to fix this?
@ captainkirk – I had the same issue….. instead of trying to get to those setting from the top left menu, use the window view option (where you change it from text, to 3d, to timeline, etc…) and select preferences from there…. should work. Its a glitch.
hey cool plug in i got lightning on my screen but i can’t find documentation on how to get it to render??? any help appreciated…
chills and thrills
i can’t get the interface window to open at all so some of the features they are showing i don’t see. i am getting it to create what looks like bolts but then i can’t get it to render any of it. the way the doc reads…it renders without you having to add materials…it’s not working right with 2.58a…on well…on to something else…
The lightning generates, but it doesn’t show up in the render..