Alain <aze### [at] qwertyorg> wrote:
> For the lightning, you can also use some media, but emissive media. Use
> a cylinder filled with emissive media that use the cylindrical pattern
> to whitch you apply some turbulence. For this, you need to create the
> container around the origin then rotate, scale and translate it to the
> desired location.

You may also want to give it a more distinctly zig-zagging appearance, by using
multiple such cylinders touching at their ends, using rand() in a smart fashion
to pick the in-between points more or less randomly.


> If you want your lightning to illuminate the area, then, you'll need to
> add some light_source along it's path. Be sure to make those light
> fading light by adding fade_power 2 and fade_distance <some distance> to
> the deffinitions. (that's the "fast" way, but less acurate)

Note that this *may* give bands in shadows; if you want to avoid these, using a
series of well-placed 1-dimensional "area" lights with the "jitter" keyword may
help.


> The Slow, but more acurate, way is to use radiosity with the "media on"
> option. This way, the emissive media can actualy illuminate it's
> surrounding. But, as I said, radiosity is slow! Also, there are many
> settable parameters whose function and effects are not always obvious or
> easy to set.

Note that a lightning will probably be too thin to be captured by radiosity
effectively, resulting in ugly blotchy lighting.


> If you are tight on time, may I suggest looking to some other kind of
> scene...

Yup - I definitely second this advice.

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