Easy Lightning Tutorial

Erisian · **Posted:** Tue May 22, 2012 11:46 am **(#1)**

Create a new document - mine is 600x800 - select a large hard round brush and colour one half of the page black so that the division is the shape of your lightning bolt.

Run filters/blur/gaussian blur choosing 100px for both x and y.

Open filters/render/clouds/difference clouds, choose the following values then click OK.

Select colours/invert colours

Select colours/levels and push the left hand input slider to the right until you are happy with the lightning.

Colour/colourize - I chose these values

Good for electrical sparks too! (Maybe your control panel is short-circuiting Drac.)

ZWard117 · **Joined:** Jan 20, 2012 **Posts:** 583

I had a script for this but 2.8 broke it somehow. It doesn't run and locks up scriptfu.exe and such. This will work great until I get it fixed, so thanks :teeth

Erisian · **Posted:** Tue May 22, 2012 12:12 pm **(#3)**

No problem - have fun!

Draconian · **Posted:** Tue May 22, 2012 12:49 pm **(#4)**

You're right, that was pretty easy. Thanks for the idea. There may be a couple of loose wires on my control panel but they're mostly just in my head.

ZWard117 · **Joined:** Jan 20, 2012 **Posts:** 583

In fact I think this is the same technique he uses in his script

lylejk · **Joined:** Sep 24, 2010 **Posts:** 12775

Easy/breezy tut with pretty good results. Thanks for sharing it Erisian.

Erisian · **Posted:** Tue May 22, 2012 1:28 pm **(#7)**

Glad you like it Lyle.

Erisian · **Posted:** Tue May 22, 2012 1:52 pm **(#8)**

molly · **Joined:** Apr 07, 2010 **Posts:** 14182

Thanks Erisian,
nice and easy, I resized it so wouldn't take as much room.

Erisian · **Posted:** Tue May 22, 2012 1:55 pm **(#10)**

Beautiful Molly. I might try an animated version.

ZWard117 · **Joined:** Jan 20, 2012 **Posts:** 583

Looks like erisian has become the lightning god here! A resurrection of Thor himself :teeth

molly · **Joined:** Apr 07, 2010 **Posts:** 14182

Hey Drac and ZWard, where are yours?

Erisian · **Posted:** Tue May 22, 2012 2:15 pm **(#13)**

Yeah, let's see what yer made of!

Draconian · **Posted:** Tue May 22, 2012 2:38 pm **(#14)**

Don't get your drawers in a knot, I was just finishing up. I played with it a bit duplicating the layer and blurring it 100% to make a glow and cleaning up the rough places wiht a fuzzy brush. Threw this together really fast so no pickin' allowed.

Edit: Oops. Guess it helps to attach the pic.

Erisian · **Posted:** Tue May 22, 2012 2:42 pm **(#15)**

Wow! Nice work. :clap

Draconian · **Posted:** Tue May 22, 2012 2:50 pm **(#16)**

Heck the lightning was the easiest part! Wait......hold on a sec.........I'm beginning to see something...yes it's getting cearer now....lots and lots of lightning brush posts in your future.

lylejk · **Joined:** Sep 24, 2010 **Posts:** 12775

Added a few passes of AAA Good Vibrations (50 and 25 periods) then after the cloud step, added some low amplitude sparkle to the result.

Erisian · **Posted:** Tue May 22, 2012 3:05 pm **(#18)**

That's really cool Lyle. I can almost imagine an abandoned keep on top of a mountain.

Erisian · **Posted:** Tue May 22, 2012 3:06 pm **(#19)**

Draconian wrote:

Heck the lightning was the easiest part! Wait......hold on a sec.........I'm beginning to see something...yes it's getting cearer now....lots and lots of lightning brush posts in your future.

Ahem!

ZWard117 · **Joined:** Jan 20, 2012 **Posts:** 583

Like this way much better; Easier to adjust to user preference

Just a simple throw together, so much fun though :teeth

QUIT THE NINJAS! 5 times!!!!