DEVELOP ELECTRIC ATMOSPHERE WITH LIGHTNING EFFECTS

Rob Redman delivers a bolt of brilliance with a quick guide to giving your scenes a high-voltage feeling

- Rob Redman

As with so much in the realm of visual effects, there are a myriad of methods and tools that can be utilised to achieve the same end results. If you’re looking to add atmospheric effects such as lightning to your scenes it can be much too easy to think in 3D and try to add splines with animated paths, set up emitting materials and so on.

That’s all well and good, but it can be time-consuming and taxing at render time. There are cases where that’s the best way to go, such as when the lightning needs to illuminate a complex shape or a moving character. That said, for an environment shot or something less complex, doing it in post-production can be a much better way; quicker to set up and faster to render.

For this example I’m taking a background plate of an exterior scene and adding lightning to it, along with rain created using a particle system just like I showed you a couple of issues ago. This is a quick effect to set up and the resulting lightning is perfect for the shot. It’s not bad for around 15 minutes of work, especially considering it will only be seen for half a second!

01 ORGANISE PLATES AND OTHER ELEMENTS

To get started you’ll need to import your background plate. You can drag this directly into the timeline. If a dialogue box opens, you can set elements like length and size here, plus give it a name. Use a name to help you stay organised, in case you end up with lots of layers. That said, this is likely to be at the bottom of the stack. This is also a good time to add any other elements. For me, I used particles to add rain – see issue 312 for a guide to that.

02 DEFINE THE LIGHTNING’S PATH