Hi all, Last night I made myself what I thought was a decent atmosphere. "OO" I thought - that could do with a bit of lightning - so proceded to try and make some for my scene - and do you know - I couldn't !!(Hardly suprising) I tried it with symm. lattice and terrains - but kekp getting the square 'base' when creating it. Any thoughts - coz I can't wait to start putting materials to it - making it glow etc. My inspiration came from some guy I saw on TV the other day called the Lightning Chaser or somehting like that - it was on Channel 4 (UK tv) and he was one of these nut case storm chasers who takes superb pics of lightning - I wondered if I could do something like it in Vue?

Hey I saw that, it was cool....could you do it in Vue, I don't see why not....although I have not tried it. Sharen

I really think alot can be done with Vue, more than I know right now. Sharen :-)

Well, off the top of my head, you have 3 choices... 1 You can either create a lightning-like figure in a modeler (like Rhino, or whatever), bring that into Vue and then apply some of the glow materials and play with it in Vue 2 you can get a picture of lightning, fix it so that you can bring it in as alpha plane and put that in the picture... 3 Just do the lightning in post.. I understand that the plug in Xenofex for image processors creates very easy and cool lightning... My own 2 cents on these kinds of situations is that no program out there is designed to create everything within it... That's why 3d studio max, lightwave and such have plug ins... And life's too short to be dealing with the limitations of any program, when ther's another program out there that can do it easily... :) So, I would look outside of Vue to create lightning... :) But then again, somebody may have figured out how to do lightning in Vue... :) There's always that possibility...

Attached Link: http://www.derby-vi-service.demon.co.uk/pictures.htm

First, if you meant by 'using terrain and getting a square base' that you drew lightning in the terrain editor, you can get rid of the square base in terrain editor by using the clip function. Second, using an alpha plane can give excellent results. Make your alpha-map by creating a negative of your lighning picture, and altering the tone curve in photopaint or similar until you get the transparency curve you need. You can see a couple of images with lighning on my site, follow the link.

There is one easy solution, but the results are "average"...

1. Create a dark cloudy atmosphere
2. Load a "large dead tree" from the plants collection.
3. Turn it upside down and make it really big.
4. change the material to "luminous glow".
5. adjust the color and the glow intensity of the material.
6. add spot lights to create a more dramatic effect.

And it's done ! an "average" lightning...

Eric

Hey, that's pretty cool Eric, definitely worth trying out..

Great tips here! There is also, if I recall right, a lightning model in free stuff. I'm not sure if it's in the Poser or Miscellaneous section, I think it's one of those. Bringing up "All" and then running a search will probably locate it. Be sure to show us what you come up with. :)

Thanks everyone - couldn't get back yesterday (Busy man, see) - some great tips - I'll try 'em all! :D Although I am embarrassed by the fact I handn't thought of Clipping the terrain I used - duh!! Bye for now Poll