Fly a Fighter Aircraft Through a Storm - Blender 2.5 - page 98

Noice that the peak value for the curve is 20 , which is quite a high energy value.
This is because the strong scatering of the cloud dims the light too fast, so a high
energy value is needed.
4. We can take some ime and make some test renders to see how well the lightning
effect inside the clouds looks; almost for sure, we will need to move the lamp so
that it is located inside the cloud, but not too far from the cloud surface.
Objective Complete - Mini Debriefing
This very short task allowed us to add a very basic lightning effect to the storm cloud, using
just a simple lamp, and animaing its energy value.
The worklow for animaing the energy value was simply creaing the irst and last keyframes
of the animaion and then adding three more keyframes by hand directly in the Graph Editor.
This is an easy and fast way to do it, since adding keyframes from the Blender UI would have
also required some more tweaking later.
Mission Accomplished
The results of a few simple techniques are quite nice to behold. Except for the modeling part,
this project is quite easy to accomplish and the results are very good.
In the modeling task, we worked hard to get a very good shape on the top part of the
aircraft and applied some topology concepts to make sure that the final result would be the
expected one. This task showed us the importance of always looking at our models from
diferent angles and inspecing the shape at all imes to get good results.
The shading part went by very fast, but that doesn't mean that our shaders are bad; in fact,
the fighterBody shader looks quite good and it only required a couple of minutes to set up.
The good thing about shading is that when the procedural textures are enough to accomplish
certain tasks and we know how to use them for the task at hand, the ime required to set
them up is almost negligible.
The volumetric material seings went by quite fast too, though it required quite a few
parameters to get it working the way we need. Anyway, the possibility of seing up this nice
storm cloud with a few parameters for the shader is really cool. We also made sure that the
cloud had a nice random look by applying some turbulence to it. The cool trick in this part
was using a paricle system atached to the faces of a mesh to control the density of the
volumetric material; this gives us almost total control on both the shape of the cloud and
the final render appearance.
Finally we just added a couple of inishing touches by animaing the trajectory for the aircrat
and puing a simple lightning efect inside the storm cloud. In this part, we just applied
some simple worklows to avoid overcomplicaing the task.