Week 04: A Rude Awakening

This week I began work on my lightning tool and oh boy, it was more work than I anticipated and it felt like my progress was slow despite spending so much time thinking of new methods to approach my tool. I was constantly thinking up of a new method that I was sure would solve all my problems, only to be brought back down to earth upon my realization that either A, I forget to consider something, or B, I couldn’t find a way to actually make my idea work in Houdini.

Above you can see that I was able to successfully create lightning branching off from the main lightning, but there are flaws and improvements to be made.

Above is an image of an overview of my tool. In order to create the lightning branching off from the main lightning, I created a new popnet on the main lightning curve. From here on I used a ray node in order to make the point follow the movement of the curve. I then created a new line on the right hand side for the lightning branches.

I now have a couple of new issues. First, there are multiple lightning branches that will live for a second or two longer after the main branch has already died off. This is very apparent in the scene and I’m still having a tough time thinking of how to solve this. Second, I want to be able to control the direction of the lightning. Third, I want to create more variation in the length of lightning branching off from the main lightning.