OK - new to B5 - had B4, then flirtation with Vue4 (which is easier to create materials in and renders much faster, I had to say) then some time (5 months)away due to a BITCH of a PC - Now I am back (with new PC)I need to know how to make good lightning in B5. Any one help? [don't be offended by the Vue thing - it's just opinion ;-)] Ta Poll

first off.. u don't.. unless you can model in lightwave or cinema you have to add the lightning afterwards in post work. Its just the way it is.

??????????? Just build the lights like you actually would in a scene. If you have a regular light bulb, make a radial light. If you need a spotlight type effect, make one of those. If you need a laser type effect, make a parallel light.

uh... wrong??? one way to create lightning in B5 is to create a lattice, up the resolution to at least 1024, and draw your lightning directly into the terrain editor. Give it a whitish-bluish reflective metal surface, place it behind your scene (or wherever) and shine a spotlight on it.... should work. No high-end modelling app required... It's just the way it is.

Use a transparent object with the lightning affect painted on to it. Load it using the 2D picture editor. You should also create a negative version to it to give the transparent affect.

That works, too. And if you have the latest KPT effects plug-in for Photoshop or Painter, there's a great lightning plug-in to help create your 2D image.

if you give me your e-mail address ill send you a lightning
preset i have for bryce in 3DS

roch222

D'oh!!!!!! I am not thinking today. Lightning...not lighting....I get it! In that case I use the method above, but I use a different way of getting the glow. Once you have the base lightning painted, duplicate the terrain. Open the terrain editor and click smooth about 20 times. Then apply the "green lit" material from the complex fx section. Open up the material lab and set transparency to zero, with the color a light blue. Select the first lighting (the one without all the smoothing) and apply the same material. Only this time, make sure "fuzzy" is not checked. This should make it a lot brighter. Then render and see how it looks. What should happen is that the first lightning terrain should be a bright glow, and the second one should have all the right fuzz around the edges. You can see this if you download my lightsaber pack from freestuff.

Attached Link: http://www.mways.co.uk/plugin.php

http://www.mways.co.uk/plugin.php has Almathera set of plugins, which has Lightning Maker included. It's free.

-- erlik

The above methods will work fine. But unless you want 100% Bryce (for a competition or whatever) why not use post? IMO the render overhead of one or two hi-res terrains isn't worth it for the 2 minutes it would take in post. You can always add lights in your scene to glow where the lightening would be, just without the actual object.

You need a picture of lightning on a black background...create a 2d plane then in the material editor use your image as the texture. In the texture source editor load yur picture into both windows. Set the diffuse and ambiance to that material, and also use it to drive the ambiance and trans. Turn off cast and receive shadows, and you're done. Postwork might acctually be easier, but its fun doin it in bryce.

Attached Link: http://www.brycetech.com

Brycetech has some .dxf models of lightning or you could use the methods above. Well he used to have some for download, I have them but I'm not sure if he'd like me to distribute them.

There are several threads here that give a lot of different solutions for lightning, just search Bryce Forum with keyword "lightning".

This is not my "second childhood". I'm not finished with the first one yet.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

"I'd like to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather....not screaming in terror like the passengers on his bus." - Jack Handy

Aye, I've tried all kinds of lightnings for Bryce, and natively, the terrain modeler is perfect. BUT...! KPT Lightning is way sicker, and pretty much levels the competition as far as I can tell for realistic, animateable lightning. Don't use it in post, make the lightning and import it into your scene, then use a few ranged radial lights to light it up. Don't use external colors, merely the lightning image as a transparency map... (blend transparency).... Or use it as a height-map for a terrain-based Lightning. You'll see some lightning in my new works...