How to Create a Lightning Storm in Blender

hey guys what's up this is Andrew price here from blender guru.com and in this video tutorial I'm gonna be showing you how to create lightning within blender 2.5 now this was something that a lot of you guys requested I put the call out there said what weather tutorials do you want to see and this was a hot request by far everybody was just like lightning lightning lightning lightning I want to see lightning so yeah I've listened and I'm making a tutorial on it now so yet what you saw at the beginning was the finished animation that I created using the techniques that I'm gonna be teaching in this tutorial and as is this final image that you can see right in front of you now before I get into the meat bones of blender I want to show you some reference video now this is uh this is on YouTube obviously now it's just a footage of a lightning storm which was shot in West Texas it says there now the point the reason I'm showing you this footage is because well as with any project that you before you start any project really you should be looking at reference and photos and videos all sorts of things like that but particularly for lightning now the reason for that is lightning is one of the most unpredictable things on the face of the earth okay I was watching a documentary on the Discovery Channel and they had some lightning experts on there like one of those storm chaser people and yeah they were basically saying that you know they've they've been studying lightning and their patterns and things like that and they'll make predictions about you know what storms are gonna happen in that and lining just continually proves them wrong in in that you can't really make any rules around lining I mean because every single lightning bolt is different in the way it behaves the way it moves I mean some lightning bolts you know hit the ground others just shoot across the sky and go into clouds and things like that so my point is don't be afraid to go a little outlandish and just create something crazy with your lightning storm because I was gonna call you out and go all that lightning doesn't look right who's nuts booth behaved like that it doesn't matter I mean nature's doing some crazy stuff as it is so I'm it yeah my point is it's completely random so yeah go nuts so for my tutorial I'll be showing it as I explain how to create this lightning bolt right here now before I start the tutorial I just want to give you an overview of how that what makes up the scene okay just so you can see how it's created so basically you've got some clouds they're City underneath and of course this lightning bolt right here now the lightning bolt is actually a curved object which I've modeled so I'll show you how to model that unique pattern that you can see there and as well as the main lightning bolt you've also got these little uh I don't know like tentacles I call them little offspring of the lightning bolt now they're actually different in the way they behave to the standard lightning bolt so I'll be showing you how to animate both of these these separate objects as well now as well as that I'll also show you how to create the lightning flashes within the clouds so that the light boom effect now the clouds themselves they're like basically pulled directly out of the volumetric clouds tutorial so if you want to follow that yet by all means now there's also as well in this tutorial I'll show you how to do the compositing how to get that cool glow effect of the lining bolt alright so jumping over now into the the starter tutorial file okay I want to start by making a yet by making the main lightning bolt so first and foremost what I need to do is load in a reference photo so I'm just going here pressing and you bring up this tool toolbar thingy here and I'm going to add we go open now you can find any reference photo you want you could pull one off the net this is one I pulled off Flickr where I normally find all my images okay so once you've loaded it there you're going to want to add a curved object okay I'm gonna go into top-down mode I'm just gonna remove that little kink there just for ease of use I'm just gonna shrink it okay so just get it in line with where the lightning bolt starts okay now if you go to the curve options over here you'll see it's got its got some pre default options which we want to change so I'm gonna turn off front and back and that will stop it from getting that sort of weird artifact of like front or back side you have to define and the other thing we're going to give it some depth okay that's the main one now obviously the large you make that the fatter the curve is gonna look so I want to make it just a little bit smaller than what is in the background image there cuz obviously there's some glow in that image there but yeah now the other thing is that these are these handles here when you move them they're actually very smooth now that's not the way lightning behaves it's very jagged and very sharp so if you select both of those handles and you press V you get vector handles instead which are a lot sharper and jagged which is the way it should be for lightning okay now for modeling the lining what you need to do is with this this last handle selected you hold down control and just click along the lightning bolt and you will see well what am i doing you'll see yeah it creates a new anchor every time you click so it's a very very simple way of modeling or tracing a lightning bolt now there is no unfortunate there's no magic bullet to this process and you can't just press a bun and then a lightning bolt is created I don't think there's a plug-in for that yet but yeah you can that this is basically the best method that I found and the most unique way as well I mean scripts can only go so far so far before they start looking like scripts I'm not a big fan of scripts today they're true I don't like I'm a tall so yeah anyway that was a little rant there but this is just going along and just holding down control and clicking you get the eventual shape of a lightning bolt now obviously the longer you spend on this the more detail your lightning bolt is going to have I spent a little bit of time on mine but yeah you know just put on some music and just control click it's not that hard now obviously for my entire scene I did that for every single one of those little tentacle offspring things there that you you can see in the background but you can go into as much or little detail feel seen as you like how's that for some filler talk while I did that pretty good I could be a DJ maybe not all right so it's got that weird problem there I'm not sure why every time I do that it's um it's done that thing um alright so once you've got the basic model of the lightning bolt work down you need to get into the animation process because obviously a lightning bolt doesn't just sit there like a big glowing neon in the sky it appears suddenly and then it disappears suddenly but in fact the lightning bolt doesn't really behave in the way that you think it would now I'll show you what I mean this is some reference video now in fact it's actually the same reference video to the YouTube video I showed you before I've just put it into video land here just so I can show you a slow-motion replay but basically if I just scrub through this so this is a lightning strike there you go got the big boom effect there now watch as it starts to disappear okay as you can see it's disappearing fairly normally and there you go as you can see here you've actually got the lightning bolt disintegrating so instead of it just sort of fading away like equally across the whole thing it disappears in parts and just sort of breaks up almost like it's dissolving in the middle of the air and if you go to the next frame you can see there's just a few little glints of light left before it disappears entirely so yeah that was a surprise to me because honestly I thought lightning bolts just just faded out normally but apparently not so that's another reason why I should be looking at our reference video before you start things but yeah so I want to saw this footage I thought myself I mean how am I gonna animate that cuz you know dissolving something within blender it's gonna be quite difficult to do so I started experimenting with a few things and I came up with a pretty easy yet effective method to dissolve something so what I'll do is I'm gonna add a new material now I'm gonna set the emit value to one and I'm gonna turn transparency on and I'm gonna set the Alpha to zero and the specular intensity to zero as well so now the bolt is completely invisible fantastic so if we add a new texture now I'm gonna leave it as the default clouds texture and if we go down here to the influence panel we turn off color I'm going to turn on alpha and emit okay so what that's gonna do is if I turn on both there so that's the texture and that's our material what's that's going to do is it's now making the black parts of this texture it's making it transparent and the white parts are now the solid lightning-bolt material now just to exaggerate that if I turn down this brightness as you can see you can see now that the parts of the sphere where the black is it's now completely transparent but if you see if I just press this when I turn down the brightness that sphere up there actually disintegrates as you can see so what if you were able to animate this brightness value BAM you can if you hover over the the the value there and you press I that inserts a keyframe which you can now animate okay so if I split the window here and add a graph editor yeah there is a bug I think in blender it doesn't actually show it straight away to get it to show I just click on offset there and there you go you get these options show up here I'm not sure why that is like I said I think it's a bug but yeah until that's worked out that's my little worker way around it but yeah basically if we just zoom in here okay so we've got that brightness value there and it's showing up on that little graph there and it's now at 0.1 okay and you can deselect it and things like that just over here okay now if we scroll forward say two frames and we set the brightness for that to zero and then we press I see over here I'll just pin this out just you can see what's going on so you can see we're now animating that brightness value like so I'm sure low you're familiar with this method but just for those that aren't I'm just uh just slowing it down a little bit so as you can see if we have a look at this this material value there you can see it's going from invisible to a little bit invisible to solid white or almost solid and now if we are let's say if we scroll forward say six frames and we set the brightness to zero there and we add another keyframe so what that's doing is it's now making this material file to switch the materials you can see it happen if we go forward a little bit so the lightning bolt is been appearing a little bit it's going solid and then gradually it's now disintegrating so that's pretty much perfect for what we want so yeah like I said really simple really easy way to make something dissolve in blender now the lightning strike itself I don't you have the fridge to show you I've just closed it down but it strikes several times in the same spot in that you know you'll see it sort of appear just quickly then they'll be up maybe a big flash then another flash basically doesn't just appear and then disappear it sometimes hits it up to you know four times I've seen in videos so yeah you can play around with these these values so what I did for mine I just made it basically just created like a hill pattern like so I'm not sure what's up with this one alright there we go so yeah so basically it's now going from nothing to up to down a little bit and then solid again this is right back down and then back again in full full strike and then maybe just bring that out as well so you can play around with the different settings you go for you can get different results for different lightning strikes you want but basically that's just making a triple strike there's a boom boom boom and each is sort of brighter than the last at least to an extent anyway until it sort of cuts out with this brightness thing but yeah so that is basically how to animate a lightning bolt now that is for the main stalk of the lightning bolt what I'm going to show you now just quickly is how to create this second one alright so what I've done is I've just just selected two of those points there press shift D and then with those new points selected I'm pressing P and that's now made that curved object a separate object on its own okay I'm just going to move the origin to that point as well all right now I'm going to change the curve options to set the depth obviously to something a lot smaller than the main strike there and I'm gonna do just quickly what I did before for the other lightning bolt and I'm just gonna just trace around this this other little offspring of a lightning bolt because as I explained at the beginning this is different these little lightning bolts here they behave differently to the main striking point that's why I'm showing you this little bit here now a lot of lightning you'll see a lot of it is just like the main strike and a lot of them don't have these little tentacle things that shoot off it but I find it gives it a cooler more realistic result if you do have it in there so with that in place what I need to do is before I get into the texturing and materials and animate I need to actually UV unwrap that that strike there now there is a reason for that all right I'll show you in a second but first of all we need to convert it to a mesh so we press alt C and then select mesh from curve okay so now that's that's converted it from a mesh from a curve to a basic mesh that you would use for any cube or plane or whatever you've got there now with that done we can now UV unwrap it so if I split the window set that to UV image editor now with that object there all those vertices selected I'm going to hit you and select project from view okay basically that tiles has just taken those vertices and stamped it straight over there it's really the simplest easiest way to UV unwrap anything the day I discovered that method it would save me a lot of time trust me so basically all I've done is I've just rotated it so that that part there is at the top of that UV UV box and that part is at the bottom obviously really simple really easy now I'm gonna give it a new material okay with the basically the same settings as what we had before the met one transparency 0 okay now I'm gonna add a new texture but I'm gonna make it blend okay and so you might be cluing what I'm already gonna do next I'll just explain it I'm gonna set I'm gonna turn on color ramp okay now this is gonna allow us to create a gradient from the top down to the bottom of our lightning strike now to do that in the influence panel I'm going to turn on alpha and emit just like I did for the main bolt but now it's for this obviously okay now so basically that white part there is obviously gonna we want it to be the base of that so that is the top which as you can see there it's already in the right spot if you turn on show alpha then it gets rid of that black part and let me show you the Alpha of the of the object which is quite handy and then the important bit is if we need to go here in the mapping options and change it to you V so now if we go to the material you see it you will see it's actually around the wrong way in the material for the oh there we go that's the right way but yeah basically now it's going from white all the way down to zero and in fact if we were to render this now I think I need to just before I do that yeah just for sake of this just quick when quick render okay so it's already looking pretty good if we zoom in here you can see that it's now starting where it should and it's as the gradient goes along it's now fading out towards the tip now these are these bolts here as explained they they basically the way they work at least in the video footage that I've seen is they sort of sprout out from the main stalk there and then they retreat back in and happens very quickly you know maybe over five or six frames or something but it creates really unique sort of effect yeah particular just to lightning really and obviously so so yeah so basically how would we animate a gradient effect yeah in blender well good news is it is using the exact same method that we did for the the main stalk here so with this this texture here selected I'm gonna switch to the graph editor okay and texture okay we're gonna use the brightness control there so if I increase this brightness you can see that the gradient up there is also getting larger so you don't have to animate any of these controls or anything within the color band you just have to animate the the the brightness there and that just controls everything really I mean this brightness controls amazing um so if I just click press I on that point there and then just zoom in down here I'm gonna start animating basically yeah just along the same lines that we've got here for the other ones for the for the previous the main strike thing there I'm just gonna click just like so so basically what that means is if you just if you watch this material sitting over here as I scroll through it you can see that we're animating yeah basically how they appear from the main stalk and then disappear so yeah that's that's really simple it's just basically the exact same method that we did before now we could do that for all of the the previous all the other ones that are part of the image where'd it go there we go yeah I mean we could do that for all the others I'm not gonna bore you all by showing you how to do it for the entire tutorial I'm just going to jump now to the finish the final product there so shimmy you've done everything right if you've rendered now you should see a result pretty similar to this where it's all working the way it should you've got the main stalk main strike bolt there and you've got these other little children bolts coming out of it with the the gradient effect there so it's fading out towards the tip so that's brilliant so it's all ready to go now now the only other thing that we need to do is uh is create some light flashes in the in the clouds okay now as I explain these clouds are volumetric clouds there's a tutorial for that on Blender guru comm if you want to have a look for it you can but yet very basic looking cloud there with just a a standard volume mature material now what we're going to be doing is I'm going to be creating a yeah just that light flash in the cloud at the same time as the lightning bolt appears to give it a a realistic look so just at the point of that lightning bolt if we go our shift s and cut and select cursor to selected it will then place the cursor at the base of the lightning bolt and I'm then going to add a lamp okay now with that lamp in place basically that's gonna light using the volumetric shading system before the class it's gonna light within the clouds and it's already gonna look pretty realistic what I'm going to do though is I'm gonna set the sphere amount I'm gonna check the sphere button there and I'm just gonna set it to let's say let's say mm maybe 10 see how that looks so it just depends on how big you want the light flash to appear but yeah you can experiment with different settings there so basically if we rendered this now just with that that lighting that that lamp there as such let's just have a look at how this looks okay so it's looking pretty good at the moment we've got the lamp in the right place as you can see the only trouble is is that the light is very weak and so it's a really weak lightning flash if it was real so we want to make that a lot brighter and we also want to make it animate in time with the lightning bolt so to do that I'm going to split this into a graph editor okay and over here we've got the energy value for our lamp now if we press I like that you can see over here we've now got a little pop-up thing there for this lamp so we can now start adding keyframes for the energy value of this lamp just shrink it down so we can see everything okay so there it is right there now the first thing I said I wanted to do was obviously make it a lot brighter so I'm gonna set this up to let's say 15 let's just go nuts okay now we can now start animating so if we go backwards two frames I'm gonna make this a lot less bright like so and then if we go back again you can see I'm using the same wavy pattern here that we've got underneath and I'm just creating it for for this this lamp setting just say there and then maybe down to zero right here so it won't just go suddenly really bright they're not so bright and they're very bright and then down a little bit and then bright again maybe I might just reduce that just so it's in line with the wavy pattern underneath and then finally we're gonna make it fade to zero just as the others do like that so there's now nothing okay all right now let's see let's have a look at how this looks when rendered now okay much more realistic so it's it's a lot brighter obviously and if we were to animate that you'd see that that would flicker in time with the lightning bolts itself okay so with now that it's all set up what I'm going to show you now is how to add the glow effects to the lightning bolt itself so to do that what we need to do first of all is separate the lightning bolts onto a separate render layer now I don't want to you know bore too many people here for people that already know it but briefly render layers are different to the normal blender layers which you can see down there in that basically they are rendering just one layer picking one layer from one of these things and separating it onto a separate sort of a separate render which you can then add effects to and then combined with the rest of the scene so I've added a new render layer here and I'm calling this one lightning like that's a spell there we go and I've just clicked layer four there because basically that is the layer that we've got our lightning bolts on okay so by clicking layer four it's now basically rendering just the lightning on a separate render layer now anytime you make change Mint's to the render layers you do need to read render it so let's do that now okay at which point you may get a render like this where basically it looks as though lightning has disappeared that's because the lightning is now on a separate render layer and it hasn't been composited yet so what we need to do is switch to the compositor now the quickest way to do that is to press ctrl left arrow ok now I've already done some compositing because for my scene I've got as you can see a night city in the background there so I've added some some glow effects and some other things in there but you don't need to worry about any of that basically what we need to do is add the lightning bolts to the compositor so to do that we're going to add the render layer and you render layer and from this drop-down list we're going to select lightning turnoff backdrop just we can see all we're doing now if we add a viewer node you can see where now we're now basically applying effects directly just to this lightning render layer so what the quickest way to add a glow effect is with a blur node so click add a blur node and I'm going to use a fast Gaussian type of blur and it's gonna add a viewer notice we can see what we're doing maybe we do need that backdrop and these this x and y value that's going to define how big to make the glow so for this sake I'm just gonna set that to 40 and that just gives a big smudgy looking effect there now if you combine that with the original render just have a look so that's using a mix node there combine that like so and then if I set this this type to add and then FAC value to 1 for maximum glow then yeah you can see you've got a nicer glow effect around the outside of the lightning now normal camera lenses have more than one glow effect basically you've got the sort of sharp glow that will be surrounding the lightning bolts as well as a huge sort of blown out bloom glow effect so I usually add several different glow effects to something like this now again you're gonna want to make sure you use reference image just to make sure you get the glow looking right I've sort of got a general idea of what I want to do so I'm just playing it by ear but yeah I'm basically I'm just duplicating that same glow effect that we've just created there and I'm just gonna add it all together so and then we're now gonna have two glow effects I'm gonna set this this new glow effect I'm gonna set that to let's say the maximum of 256 that's giving it a huge wide big glow and in fact if I set let's say the fact value to 2 that's it multiplies it or I don't yeah doubles it or whatever you want to call it but yeah it just makes it even brighter Aksum you consent for his five which is like maximum brightness but yeah experiment with you know different values they're the only other one I'm gonna add it's just one more and this is gonna be a very small glow and this is just gonna surround see just gonna surround it the the Lightning effect very tightly so it's gonna set that to three so there we've got a nice setup you can't really zoom in there but I really just a very sharp looking very small glow just surrounding it just to give it just a sort of a realistic camera sort of unfocused looking effect now if we combine this with the original let's have a look at how this looks all together as one so there you go that is essentially how to make lightning in blender now that is ready to render in an animation now provided you've done all your key framing right yeah it's good to go it is it was a bit of a long and confusing tutorial at times with lots of different keyframes different settings was just the nature of lightning unfortunately it's a little bit crazy like that but hopefully I've explained it clear enough for you guys to give it a bash yourselves but yeah it's been fun um yeah I'm actually heading off to the skies tomorrow I'm actually flying to South Korea to visit my girlfriend for the second time this year yeah long distance is really fun but yes so hopefully I won't see any real lightning in the skies that'll be a little bit scary but yeah so you'll see me broadcasting from from South Korea for the next two months so uh so yeah that's all from me thanks very much for watching

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 132,176

Keywords: Blender, Tutorial

Id: LB0dphDcC7g

Length: 30min 25sec (1825 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 20 2012