For animation, you can light the whole scene with a bluish flat over-exposed point light with very sharp-edged, black shadows and then just turn that on for a short time (1 frame?) intermittantly. You could also do a lightning photo on an alpha plane, set the material with a heavy glow and flash that on as well. I did the above in another program (not Vue) and it worked well. Creative labs released a great thunder sound as part of their promo for their sound card a few years ago - you can probably still find it somehwere.