Blender : Animating a Lightning Strike By Saraja Olivier

Call the Material buttons (F4-KEY or ). With your lightning selected, add a new material (ADD NEW) by clicking on the  button. Turn your mesh into a luminous system by activating the  button. Different parameter buttons appear. Activate the new  button. The R, G and B colours to be set are a matter of personal taste and depends heavily on the effects your are looking for. For a fairly realist lightning, I choose R 0.800, G 0.900 and B 1.000. Set Hard 20. HaloSize depends on your mesh density (the number of times you applied a subdivide while the Beauty button was activated) and will need that you render many pictures before finding the light quality you are after. Try with values between 0.10 and 0.50 for a good start.

Now you can call the Texture buttons (F6-KEY or ) and add a new texture (ADD NEW) by clicking on the  button. A row of texture types should appear. Please pick  to access the parameters of a marble procedural texture. Try the following values : NoiseSize : 0.250, NoiseDepth : 2 and Turbulence : 12.00. Perfect ! Activate the Hard Noise and Sharper buttons like in the following picture. In fact, you can do almost anything you want at this stage, the result will surely be a intersting one, so feel free to experiment various parameters.

Let's get back to the Material buttons (F4-KEY or ) to tune our settings. The newly created texture appears with those hideous pink stripes which is Blender's default secondary color. Our first move will be to modify this colour with the R, G and B sliders in the area devoted to the texture parameters, on the right. Choose R: 1.000, G: 1.000 and B: 1.000 in order to get a perfect white that will sharpen the light blue of the lightning. Activate the Alpha and Mul buttons from the texture parameters buttons. On the seconf line of texture direction display, click on X instead of Y. The look of your texture should change drastically. Our lightning is now ready for animation !