Anyone have any ideas on how to model lightning and electrical arcs, apart from the Thor plug-in that is. Right now the budget doesn't have room for what my wife refers to as "discretionary toys". Thanks

rfornasari, A long time ago I thought of trying to use 3d trees for that purpose. You might try playing with that idea using either old dead tree freebees or making a model from xfrog or some other tree modeling program - I haven't gotten around to doing it myself yet ... arcs . . . catenary? hyperbola? sorry that might or not be of help, - TJ

Thanks, an interesting concept for the structure. What about the light? (I'm using C1.1 - see comment on budgets earlier) Do you think a series of bulbs or DCG's tube lights would be a better go. I can see lots of playing around with this one

I've always done this by modeling a thin tube in the spline modeler. Then I use the glare setting with the glow in the texture set to white. You can look at the "lighening" bolts of the power coupling in my Pod Racer image as an example (in the gallery). -Kix