MAX - Creating a Lightning Background

[Veduka]

chopper_lightning.jpg

Hi everyone, i found a very easy way to create the illusion of thunderbolts in 3Ds max. It doesn't look pro but it will do the thing

1) Make a very dark scene, use very very dark HDRI maps and set their value to very very low (0,2 for example), and set a light over your object.

2) Make a plane very far away from your object and texture it with a thunder image (use Yahoo or Google images search ), set the Self-Illumination to 100.

3) Set a Direct Light with intesy of 1,5 - 2 (white colour) just in front of the plane with the thunder texture. Turn on his shadow casting. For now, turn off that direct light

5) Hide the plane with the thunder texture

4) Render your scene from frame 1 - 100 (for example)

5) Now, unhide the plane with the thunder texture and turn on the direct light and render from frame 101 - 104

6) Turn off that direct light and hide the plane and render frames 105 - 110

6) Unhide again the plane with the thunder texture and turn on the direct light and render from frame 111 - 113

7) Turn off that direct light and hide the plane and render the rest of your scene.

8 ) Use Adobe Premiere Pro or other video editing apps to put the parts together

That's it, hope it helps someone

You can also texture the plane with a thunder video so it will look much more realistic, or you could use diferent textures of thunderbolts each time you unhide the plane.


Here is a quick example that I created:

Ego Media