The Mill X SCAD: Week 7 Review
SCAD X THE MILL
11/1/20232 min read
Team Lightning
Phirada Kanjanangkulpunt: FX Artist
Thomas Green: Lighting / LookDev. Artist
https://www.thomasandrewgreen.com
Drew Daly: Compositor
Chris Arya: Animator
Amanda Rabade: Rigger
Aidan Jones: Sound Designer
This weeks update:
This week I wanted to focus on getting the lightning strike source in the video. A comment was made that the lightning is random, so having that initial spark or source of the lightning could make it more clear and build the suspense in the beginning.
Lightning Strike
I wanted to create a strike of lightning that hit the same spot on the plug as the source lightning. So I started object merged that geo in to have that as a base to make sure it is relative to that point.
After having this starting base, I blasted all of the points except the one point that I wanted the lightning strike to hit.
When I first made the strike, it appeared by frame number. I did not like the style of it as it seemed really sudden. To fix this, I added a carve node that would add that smooth transition that I was looking for. It is subtle and still shows up quickly, but it does smoothly strike down. Then, I added the smaller branches onto the main branch to add variation so its not just one branch.
NOISE!!
Finally, I added the noise similar that I did for the source lightning. The nice thing that instead of having to do a for each for each individual lightning strike, it was only one so it was not as heavy on the computer.
Last but not least, I connected that to a mesh light to see some visibility in the render.