Lightning streaks – Blender

xeon wrote:

The approach Mikhail is describing may require you to use a photo editor. If you want the effect animated, you will need to create a sprite sheet. But the short answer to your question is yes. Using a sprite (a single image or animated sequence) will allow you to control the intensity, radius and overall effect without the use of Bloom.

Blender and Verge3d are two tools in the interactive development tool bag. Using a photo editor like Photoshop or Affinity Photo is a very essential tool. I strongly advise adding it to your skill sets. Affinity Photo is inexpensive…and has no monthly fees so that might be a good place to start.

Bloom in Blender and Bloom in Verge3d vary based on the emission settings you as a developer create. They can be adjusted by controlling your other materials as well as the emissive materials you are wanting to glow as well as the bloom parameters. All of these things can be animated and adjusted to optimize how your scene looks at any given time in either Blender or V3D.

Depending on your project, the type of animation you are trying to achieve, the number of images or sprite sheets you need to create, their size, quantity and devices you want your interactive to work on will determine if this is a good approach vs using Bloom in V3D.

Thanks for the suggestion, especially regarding photo editors, unfortunately, I can’t pay for them, so I guess that’s outta question at the moment. Do you know if Blender would enable me to render effects into images, instead?

Alright, I”ll look into those links ^^

xeon wrote:

Blender will render any of the effects you create into an image. To create a lighting bolt you may want to use Blender’s built-in compositor to make sure the background of the image is transparent and that any glow/effect you put on it will maintain its transparency. This will give you an image you can use in a shader to create the effect you are looking for using one static image.

If the bolt and the effects are animated you will want use one of those free image editors and create a sprite sheet

Pardon the stupid question, but do you have any youtube videos to get me started on this? Especially regarding how to render effects created into an image.

xeon wrote:

If you are not familiar with sprite sheets … let me know.

Unfortunately not. May I know what you’d suggest?

Also, do you think Inkscape is a compatible photo editor here for Blender, too? Especially in terms of sprite sheet?

• This reply was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by c4cc.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by c4cc.

xeon wrote:

I am not familiar with Inkscape but it seems to be more about creating vector art than photo manipulation. You need a tool that will let you import images and arrange them / snap to a grid of your creation to create a sprite sheet.

Once you create your desired animation you are going to render it in blender as a sequence of images with alpha. So lets say your animation is 16 frames long. You will have a series of images 0 to 15. You will need to then create a blank image in something like GIMP and create a 5×5 grid based on the image resolution you want. It might be a 2048×2048 square image as an example. Each grid square in your newly created 2048×2048 would then be created as 512×512 pixels. This will divide the 2048×2048 into a 4×4 grid. You will then copy, scale and place each image in sequence right to left or top to bottom. If you were going across Image 0 would go in the top left corner at 0,0, Image 1 would be at 512, 0, Image 2 would be at 1024,0 and Image 3 would be at 1536,0. Image 4 would start the next row and be located at 0, 512 Image 5 512, 512, image 6 1024, 512, and Image 7 1536, 512. The left side of the thrid row would be image 8 0, 1024…and this continues until you fill the grid.

You will then save this image as a PNG with a transparent background.
You will end up with an image that has each frame of the animation in one big image.

You then assign this image as a texture to a plane. Using alpha blend or other blend property you can then use shader nodes and animate the UVs. Once you get the image done… we can go from there.

Informative answer, I shall try this out asap