Dynamic Lightning in Blender

right alright so first we're gonna create the shape of the lightning let's go into edit mode scale this up let's make just a really rough lightning shape does not have to be pretty by any means let's add some edge loops by pressing ctrl R and let's press + to increase the amount okay cool now we got some geometry let's just create some Forks for our lightning so do that you can control click scale it down control click scale it down control it click stop stop okay let's do it let's just keep doing that you can also extrude if you like click alright now we got our rough lightning shape let's go in and scale these little points into points if we go to individual origins and then cool we want to make this thing snap and crackle and pop so let's go into the modifiers first let's add some more geometry with a subdivision surface modifier this is going to give us some more phases to work with but we don't want it to be on Catmull Klerk because that smooths everything out we want it to be on simple which keeps the original geometry just adds more phases let's go ahead and add a displacement modifier we're going to be adding three displacement modifiers the first one is going to be affecting the x-axis of the lightning and the second one is going to be affecting the y-axis and the third one is going to be adding little micro bumps to it name this big boy bumps X and let's add a new texture yeah we can just do BBB X and let's change that to X so it's only affecting the x-axis alright let's go into our texture settings make sure you have big boy bumps X selected and let's add a Voronoi texture let's increase the size to maybe five maybe three three feels good let's do that so the way we're going to be controlling the movement of these displacement modifiers is with an object so let's go ahead and add an empty let's name it lightening displacement controller cool now if we go back to our Lightning modifiers and we change the texture coordinates to objects we can use this little eyedropper on this empty cool so now if you grab the empty and you move it down you can see huh we're affecting the lightning cool let's actually add some movement to our empty by adding the location keyframe and in the graph editor let's take a look we don't need the X or Y we can delete those for the Z location though let's press n to bring up some options go over to modifiers add a generator now you can see if we hit play it'll go up but that's not what we wanted to go so let's set the X to negative one yeah that's good alright so now you can see we got some good movement on the x axis but if we go to the Y we got nothing so it's pretty much duplicate this process for the y axis so let's go ahead and add another displacement modifier let's name this big boy bumps why let's add a texture BBB y Y and direction you guessed it why why texture coordinates object let's go and find that empty all right objects empty cool now let's go to our texture settings for BBB Y and let's just change these up a bit get some variety from the X cool 2.5 2.5 now we got some nice big bumpin going on with our lightning and that we got some cool squiggly wigglies let's go ahead and add some tiny little baby bumps say rubber baby buggy bumpers a baby buggy bumper oh my god alright so let's add a new displacement modifier add a texture little baby bumps let's change the texture coordinates again to object select are a little empty there then let's go over to the texture settings make sure you got little baby bones selected and let's gonna go with clouds for this one see how that looks change the scale that feels good turn down the strength cool let's turn smooth shading on so we get a better idea of what it looks like now that we got our lightning going here comes the fun part we're going to take each point of the Lightning and we're going to assign it to an empty and then we're going to randomize the location of that empty so we get some arcs like moving all over the place and they're actually gonna be able to snap to different objects so you know the lightning moves over something and it it goes onto that thing and it moves around you'll see what I mean okay so for this process let's actually turn off our displacement modifiers they're just going to confuse us we don't need them right now alright so let's go into edit mode select one of our points here and let's shift s cursor to selected go back into object mode and add an empty scale down a bit maybe and so we are going to with the empty selected select the lightning and let's just select this whole arc let's press ctrl H hook to selected object so that is going to basically parent this geometry to this empty and you can see it's kind of moving the whole arc which we don't want we only want it to move the point and maybe trickle up a little bit so let's go into the modifier settings for our lightning which is where you can find the hook settings and you can see we got some settings here but what we care about is the radius so you can see if we move this and then turn up the radius of the fall-off ooh dial that in now we got some nice smooth fall-off for our lightning so basically repeat this process for each arc it's kind of an arduous process but it's worth it now that we have this moving properly let's actually parent all of these empties to the Lightning's so when we move the lightening around we move the empties around all right now let's add some randomized movement to these empties so let's go into just one of them first let's go to the beginning add a location keyframe and if you go down to the graph editor and open up this little panel we can delete the z-axis we don't need that one get out of here you stupid z-axis but for the x axis and the y axis let's add some randomized noise so we can go into the modifiers add some noise and you can see it's going to be real erratic but if we turn up the scale we can get it to chill out a little bit and so let's just turn the strength up to maybe two yeah turn that scale nice moving around a little bit feels good however in Hollywood lightning effects it doesn't really move around smoothly you know it kind of snaps around to different objects and surfaces and things like that so let's add a stepped interpolation modifier which will basically just make the graph blocky which is a great way to describe it let's increase that step size and you can see now we get some nice chunky movements we can actually just copy that go over to the y-axis and paste it however let's change the offset a little bit so it's not the exact same so now you can see we're moving however it's pretty blocky so it's actually turned down the influence of the stepped interpolation modifier use influence turn that down maybe that same for the X down cool so now we have a little bit of smooth and a little bit of blocky looks good so let's actually just copy these and paste them to all the other empties changing the offsets of both the noise and the stepped interpolation to get a little bit of variation so let's add another keyframe don't need that paste that in there change that change that copy that paste that change that keep going just doing it for all of them now comes the cool part which is we're going to make these arcs we're gonna make them snap to our scene any objects we have in the scene if you move the lightning over it we're gonna have it snap to the thing and stick there and then move around and it's gonna look nice let's go ahead and make a little scene so let's add a new plane scale that baby up alright let's go in there add a cube let's make it a table yeah yeah okay nice yeah and some of that and some of that ooh okay yeah add some legs oh my god yeah oh my god I should put this on turbosquid thing but like this is a really really good table cool now we got our table and floor I have to say it's a it's a great table alright so let's select one of our empties go into the constraints tab let's add a shrink-wrap constraint and with our eyedropper we are going to select our table and plane connected into one object to make sure they're in one object and so you can see now if we move our lightening around we get some nice snappiness oh yeah cool so now we could do the same process for each empty going into the constraints tab adding a new constraint I dropping the table or we could be lazy and go up to edit preferences search for the copy attributes enable that then if we select all of our empties selecting the one with the constraint last as the active object we can press control C and copy object to constraints now we got some nice snappy boys let's go back let's rename our displacement and bam we got some landing Hellyeah now let's make it look good so we're going to be rendering this in evie let's make sure bloom and screen space reflections are enabled and let's go ahead and add a material for our lightning so let's add a new material slot name this I don't know lightning go into our shader editor let's get rid of that an emission shader I'm gonna do like 54 strength change that a little bit okay looking sexy nice but you'll notice it stays the same brightness which I feel like lightning should be very erratic so let's actually add a keyframe to the strength and with that nodes selected that's going to the graph editor make sure the object is selected as well let's go into here add a new modifier noise modifier let's make the strength like 500 or something crazy cool that looks good and let's actually add a limit so that it cuts off at a certain point we want it to have a minimum value of 20 right there in the graph editor it's cutting off at 20 final little touch I'm gonna add some point lights parented to each empty just to give it a little oomph on the surface you know some surface contact light alright with an empty selected I'm going to press shift s cursor to selected that's gonna snap our 3d cursor to the empty and we are going to add with shift a a new point lights let's go ahead and make that like 50 change the color a little bit and let's go ahead and select our empty as well and parent it to the empty so now you can see we've got our empty moving around cool let's bring that back in how does it look pretty good except it's just one brightness value for the whole animation let's switch it up a bit select that light keyframe the power so press I go into the graph editor under power let's add a noise modifier strength 500 cool and then let's add a limit so it doesn't dip below zero limits minimum Y of five that looks pretty good now let's go ahead and copy that light to all the other empties so it's shift D to duplicate shift click on an empty selection to active ctrl P to parrot it to the empty let's actually go into the light and change the offset a little bit just to randomize it cool let's do the same for all of our other points if d shift-click shift s selection ActiveX control be nice let's change that offset a little bit mm-hmm all right so we're looking pretty good we have some nice reactive lighting but I'd like to add some sparks so let's go ahead and do that if we select the lightning go into our particle settings add a new particle system name that sparks then we press play you can see we got sparks emitting from the whole thing which we don't want we only want it emitting from the points so let's go into edit mode let's select these faces let's add a new vertex group name that points click assign in our particle settings let's go down to the vertex groups for density let's add points so now it only emits from the points you can see it's falling right through the floor so let's actually select the floor go over to the physics settings add a collision so now looking good however the lightning is kind of pooping out these particles I'd like to add some you know variety and some randomness to it so let's go into the particle settings under velocity let's add some velocity and the z-axis shoot it up a bit cool a little bit randomness cool that looks good but now if we set it to render view we're not going to see anything and that's because we need to assign an object to the particle system so let's create that object let's go over here I had a new eco sphere let's make sure these subdivisions are at one so we don't have too much geometry bogging down the scene and let's go ahead and create a new material called sparks I'm just gonna have a simple emission shader let's go to rendered make it like an orange or something that looks pretty good cool so now under our lightning particle settings let's go down to render set it as object and we can I drop this little spark right here and boom we got some spark you boys let's turn it on the scale if you add some scale randomness so there you have it reactive lighting straight out of blender feel free to leave a comment suggesting any more tutorials you'd like to see and hope you have a great day I'll see you next time

Channel: Peter France

Views: 393,869

Keywords: blender, lithning, lightning, lighting, tutorial

Id: E_o48J7w61s

Length: 16min 3sec (963 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 28 2020