Hi,

some days ago we discussed a lightning issue at one of Thomas entries here
(Aftermath revisited). He used an older code by Tom Melly to create the
lightning bolt. I didn't state it explicitelly, but I wasn't really convinced by
Tom Melly's work. The bolts are very angular, forking at to high angles and the
surrounding has not the emission real bolts have. Than I found a scientific
paper about this isuue:

http://scholar.google.de/scholar_url?hl=de&q=http://luaav.mat.ucsb.edu/Publications/tkim_lightning_tvcg_2007.pdf&sa=X&s
cisig=AAGBfm3PHvzJ93M1S5RpGGVWPezcycGhkw&oi=scholarr&ei=UVhhUpDJEuPS0QWTl4Fo&ved=0CC0QgAMoADAA

If you look at their final figure 15, they state that their result (to the left)
is rendered with POV. They give a source and a windows binary for 2-dimensional
lightning-objects (as far as I understand it). The main part of the paper deals
with implemtation issues one cannot achieve with POV since we have no pointer
structures. But has someone of you an idea what they are doing within their
section 4? May be one can go the hard way nowadays. Most likely it is to trivial
to them to explain details about the Lagrange equation and their solution
(especially in 3-Space). Their only references are to generall equation solvers.
What I would like to know is, what do I have to calculate for every adjacent
cell in detail. I can solve linear systems, but what?

(I admit, I have avoided lessons about differential equations during my
studies).

Best regards,
Michael

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