Making Electricity for Free

(Other than the bucks you've already spent on Lightwave)

This is a copy of a message I posted to comp.graphics.apps.lightwave on Dec. 30, 1996. Use the technique all you want, but I'd love to know what you're doing with it, or any improvements you have on it. d_glidden@tia.net.

I'm sure this has come up a few places here before, because it's so easy, but I thought I'd pass along a neat trick that I thought up the other day on how to make cool electric effects, really easily, without using non-standard plugins with Lightwave.

(I'm still in the "advanced hobbiest" stage of messing with Lightwave, so if there's a more elegant way to accomplish any of these steps, go ahead and do it that way. I'm just posting my "brute force" method of doing this.)

  1. Go into modeler and make a "one-dimentional" polygon with a bunch of points on it. (i.e. a straight line with a lot of points. You can make a lot of points, select them two at a time, and do Polygon/Make; you can make a single, two-point polygon, clone and merge, whatever works for you...)
  2. Assign this object a surface name like "Lightning" or something.
  3. Bring this object into Layout.
  4. Assign it a displacement map of Fractal Bumps. The most important settings are the Texture Amplitude, this can't be too high or the line will just distort all over your scene, and the Texture Velocity, which needs to be high enough to get a good random-appearing "wobbliness" but low enough to keep the movement smooth.
  5. Give it a color mostly white, slightly blue, 240,240,255, (or whatever suits your fancy.) Turn on glow on the surface and under Effects. Give it about 150-200% Glow Intensity.
  6. Render.
Advantages: It's really amazingly simple, and produces very good quality results. Low polygon count so, other than the glow effect, very fast render times, no pricey plugins.

Disadvantages: The biggest problem with this method is that the endpoints of your object don't get "locked down," so it makes it hard to put one end on, say, the barrel of a cool "lightning gun" and have that end of the object stay attached to the barrel. (If anyone can think of a way to make the endpoints hold still, I'd love to know.)

I've got a nice animated GIF that I used this technique at:

http://www.illusionary.com/~dglidden/destroy.html

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