Lightning ball / smooth beam emitter

Development Rendering
1

Howdy,

I’m trying to make something that has the same effect as a lightning in one of those desktop spheres:

38bbf21516f323a22c14fb80856d1a09fa68e0bc.jpeg

I’m using a beam emitter, but I have a few problems that I can’t seem to resolve.

When adding noise, it is chaotic, instead of smoothly animating.

I’d like the displacement of the propagation points to be high, but the curvature smooth.

Is it possible to have the source and target locations move around the surface of an object?

And lastly, probably most complicated, can it be made to spawn a branch, so partially down a beam a new one starts, targeting a different location, but having the parent beam also reach its originally intended target?

Cheers,

Sterling

2

Hi,

This is an old thread I know, but I’ve run into the same issue. I’ve been tweaking the noise settings for a while now but haven’t been able to smooth the motion out. Does anyone have any advice on how to do this? Here are the settings I currently have:

noise.PNG
noise.PNG546×1037 71.6 KB

3

I never found an ideal solution. One particle pro told me he never uses the beam emitter because he hates it :frowning:

If you find a solution, please post.

-S