Quote - The lightning part has been taken out of the description in the download area and also the whats new in vue 6.5.
 Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.   ?

Hey, what do you expect...if E-on don't know what they're doing, how the hell are we suppose to.
Kudos for the free update though...even  if features keep changing by the hour.
One thing that never changes is that every update (point or full) always comes across as rushed :0(

Since the  pages were edited and lightning took out that will put that to rest about how you do it. :)
 
Can move on and play with new update now instead of looking for something that wasnt there.

 the fixer still might get some lightning when his wife gets home so all is ok now. ........lol

Well she's home Iloco ans she says she's in the "mood for lurve!"   So no lightning here either!!

Alls Well that Ends Well.....:)

You can see on their Press Release they talk about creating 'true to life thunderstorms.'

With 6.5 it's now really very simple. As Wabe smartly said, you can now include lights inside clouds, and animate them on and off and they will create the illusion of lightning in the clouds. If you want a lightning bolt, just create one in Photoshop and apply it to an alpha plane with a jacked up luminosity and glow and animate it on and off at the same time you animate the light on and off.

That's what they meant by 'true to life thunderstorms.'

Before 6.5, a light object inside a cloud would not affect the cloud at all. Now it does, hence the ability to have a thunderstorm with lightning.

Not disputing anyones word but it did say lightning and now that is gone.   thefixer I believe can say the same as we both were trying to find how to do lightning.
 I take lightning as bolts from the sky.
 I do know you can do clouds and atmos to look like thunderstorms.

Since that part has been edited out there is no use at all to continue on the subject of where is it and how is it done.  Time to move on since its not there as was originaly stated but is not there now. :)

Only part I regret is I dint save the page that was edited.  No big deal so lets move on. :)

The original quote from e-on was 

*We'll be introducing Vue Infinite and xStream Release 6.5, with amazing new atmospheric effects. *
The link from Mark quoted

The new releases allow users to create skies with as many overlapping spectral cloud layers desired for complex cloudscapes. There is also a new cloud lighting technology that lets local lights affect spectral atmospheres and clouds. New functions allow creation of true-to-life thunder storms, search lights or illuminated fly through clouds. You can also render spectral atmosphere animations significantly faster thanks to the optimized spectral atmosphere anti-flickering technology.

Nowhere did it say lightENing as in lightening bolts - it's lights in the clouds that effect the clouds...  Works really nice too.  If you want lightening bolts, use the dead tree, flip upside down, give it a material with lots of glow.  Alpha planes work too.    There are also some nice lightening bolts for sale on Cornucopia.  And yes, I talked to the e-on people, who were understandably miffed/irked/hurt that something they did not advertise was immediatly being said was a promise broken. 

The new cloud layers are also going to help.  Yes, we could always add layers, but they didn't really "meld" with each other.  Now they do.  

Anyway, we got a cool update for free, and it renders clouds faster.  

Thanks e-on!

Peggy

I like the update!

I like the software!

Thank you Chipp and Peggy and the rest that have helped make sense of all this..

Great stuff!

Quote -
Nowhere did it say lightENing as in lightening bolts - it's lights in the clouds that effect the clouds...  Works really nice too.  If you want lightening bolts, use the dead tree, flip upside down, give it a material with lots of glow.  Alpha planes work too.    There are also some nice lightening bolts for sale on Cornucopia.  

Interesting idea on the dead tree for lightning  - could be especially interesting idea if one day we could modify branching points and numbers of branches in the plant editor - hadn't thought of that one before. Thanks.

(and I think it's lightNing bolts, unless the EN bit is the US spelling version, which makes me think that if there was an extra n in there at the early stages then it might have just been a typo rather than any intentional thing)

Now off to play with Vue's version of negative lights and those clouds :)

Uses 3 local lights and a single spectral cloud layer in a completely black atmosphere.

Richard

Great picture Richard!

I've posted a vue 6.5 render to my blog.  At first this didn't seem like a big change but I'm finding it's opening up a lot of possibilities.  The render is a point light inside a cloud layer with a gell but without any lens flare or volumetrics set.

One thing worth taking into account is that if your trying to light a cloud layer in the distance you may need to use far more powerfull lights than you've used before to see the effect. In a test render last night I found I needed a spot light to have a power of 20000 to get the effect I wanted.

Nice image - the lighting has a ghostly quality.

Yes this new feature it does open up many possibilities, and it might just be what I've been looking for to provide lighting for one of my long-standing ideas.

However, it doesn't work properly with Area lights yet - the clouds don't pick up the colour of the area light.

Yes, the light power does need to be cranked up quite a bit beyond usual levels to shine through the spectral particles.

I just did a few experiments and I can't make my mind up if the problem with area lights is that the colour isn't there of if it is but it gets obliterated into white when you crank the power up to a point where it lights up the cloud.  I don't know if you've sent this one in to e-on so I'll post a report to them.

OK cheers - I posted it at e-on but not as a bug report.

I'm not sure it is the high power issue - point lights colour the clouds well at high power.

P.S. Do you have a URL for posting bugs to e-on? I could only find "Contact a Technician".

Thanks
Richard

"Contact a Technician" is the way I've posted bugs to e-on.

My Ecosystems are now broken, they just populate over foreign object

One thing I noticed is that the eco-system would not populate unless the Aspect tab was active.  If I had the Numerics tab open, then the eco would not populate.  Don't know if it was doing that before...

Someone on my froum had a problem of entering numerical values if the numerical tab was off.
    This might be a related issue.    Hope you reported this to tech since it seems there is a small problem. :)
 Try changing number values in anything with the numerical on and off and see it there is a difference.  I can get it to only work corrctly when its on. :)