Lightning Strikes

Lightning Strikes
In this tutorial we are going to take a look at a method of creating some electricity zapper effects using Particle Flow.
Open a new scene in 3DS Max and press 6 to open particle view.
Bring an Empty flow out from the depot and drop it onto the stage.
Then do the same with a birth, drop it in the empty grey stage area somewhere below the Render Node.
Then connect them with the blue dongle node to the empty circle
node so they start communicating with each other.
Now select your birth and adjust its settings to the right on the command panel.
The Emit Start and Stop times depend on how long you want your electricity to be
zapping. I have made mine continue through the entire default timeline.
I am also starting with a rather large number of particles at 80,000. This number
may still go up depending on how we set up the rest of these particles.
Next add a Position Icon to the list under the birth so the particles know where to be born, and change the location to
Pivot instead of Volume.
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Now we are going to minimize our Particle View and create a few space warps to dictate the motion and speed of our
particles.
In your create tab, under the Spacewarps button you will find the forces.
Click on Wind and drag one out in your top view.
Then with your rotate tool, point the arrow in whichever direction you want the lightning strikes to shoot towards. This
wind will be our main method of speed and movement for our particles.
I've made mine shoot sort of down and to the side a bit.
Then we'll adjust the wind settings on our modify tab.
I gave it a very large strength because lighting moves ... well, as fast as lightning!
I've given it a large turbulence to make it look more jagged as it strikes out
longer frequency for this one to get a more stretched out wave look to it.
and a small scale so we can see enough of the changes.
Then back on the create tab, still under spacewarps, add a drag to the scene. It doesn't matter where you put it, it will
affect our particles globally.
On your modify tab, clear the X and Y axis settings to 0.0. but in the Z axis add 18.
This will help slow our particles down as they travel along the Z axis just enough to bunch them together and make our
particles look like a single line rather than many dots or ticks.
Open your particle view again, and add a force underneath our position Icon.
And then using the By List button, add in our First Wind and our Drag.
You can preview your animation now and you should see a single line of particles squirreling around like a single bolt of
lightning.
I am going to switch my Display settings from Ticks to Dots, and change the color to white so that we can see it a little
better.
Click on the Display 01 in your list in Particle View and adjust the settings like
these to the left.
Your particles should now look like this.
They go for a bit too long and then they break up quite a bit, we will fix that by giving them a defined distance that they
are allowed to travel.
Add a Delete operator under our Display.
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Make your delete set to By Particle Age, with a Life Span of 7 give or take, and no variation. This should shorten our bolt
up a little.
much better!
Now I don't know about you, but our bolt looks lonely, we need to give him something more, some mini bolts to zap
along side him.
To do this, we are going to add a Spawn, it is important to note that we have to add this spawn above the Force and
under the Position Icon. If it isn't in the right place it will not do what we want it to.
So, add your Spawn under the Position Icon like this one:
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A Per Second rate of 30 will do the trick, remember to give the Inherited speed a
negative number of fair size so the particles don't separate too much, and make
sure the Divergence is at 0 so they don't spread out.
The Spawn is a test, which means it comes with a new blue dongle node that we can feed into a new event.
From the depot add a Force and drop it in the empty grey stage area, then connect the blue node to it.
We are going to create a new wind source for this Force operator, but first we can go ahead and add our last delete to
stop the lightning trails from getting too unruly.
Drag and drop a delete below the new force in Event 02, and change its parameters to By Particle Age, and give it a Life
span of 1 with no variation.
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Now let's create another wind in our scene. Minimize the Particle View window and go back to the spacewarps button.
Point the new wind wherever you like, but in a different direction than our original wind. This one won't be to control
the speed of the particles, but to add an extra bit of turbulence to the strikes.
Make the settings match mine below:
Give it a much lower strength so it doesn't take over directional control.
And give yourself a variation of turbulence etc. for this one so it ripples in a
different way.
Then back in Particle View, add this new wind to our new Force we just created in the Event 02 box.
From here all we have to do is add a Material Static and a Shape to the very top of our Flow chart.
Add the Material Static, and we will come back to assign our
material to it.
Add your shape and then adjust its settings to the right in the
command panel.
We want 20 sided spheres for this one, and they should be very small. I chose 0.7
Now open up your material editor (M). Choose an empty texture slot and make your diffuse and Self Illumination color
whatever color you want your lightning bolt to glow. That's all there is to this texture. I chose a light blue.
Then click and drag it from the texture slot to the None button in the settings of our Material Static in our Particle View.
Make sure to mark Instance when you drop it onto the None button, so that any changes we make to our texture will
copy over to the particles.
Now back in your material editor, find the Assign Material ID button under the grey sphere texture slots.
Click and hold to bring up the list of numbers 0-15. Choose one, doesn't matter
which one, just remember it for the next step.
I just chose 1 instead of 0.
Then hit 8 to open your Environment and Effects Panel.
Click on the Effects Tab at the top of this window, and then click the Add button and find Lens Effects in the list and add
it to the effects.
The lens effects settings will appear below, select Glow from the list on the left, and use the > arrow to move it to the
empty list on the right.
Then with the glow selected in this list, scroll down further for the glow element settings.
Make adjustments here until you are happy with the glow
colors and intensity and size. My settings are above.
Then click on the Options tab above these settings and mark the box with a check that says "Material ID" and make sure
the number next to it matches the one you chose in our Material Editor.
If you find that there is a bit too much separation between particles in your lightning bolts, just increase the number of
particles in the birth a bit and see if that helps!
That's it! All done, just add to a scene and you will have some nasty zappers!