Lightning and Electricity

Generating realistic or highly stylized lightning and electrical arcs is a common requirement in VFX and motion graphics. While you could attempt to draw this frame-by-frame, Oraphim includes a dedicated procedural Lightning node.

Generating Lightning

  1. In the Compositor Workspace, press Shift + Spacebar.
  2. Search for and add a Lightning node.
  3. Pipe the output of the Lightning node into a Merge node. (Note: The Lightning node does not require a background input; it generates the electrical arc procedurally on a transparent background).

Controlling the Arc

When you select the Lightning node, you will see two crosshairs in the viewer.

  • The first crosshair is the Start Point.
  • The second crosshair is the End Point.

You can click and drag these crosshairs manually, or you can track them to moving objects in your scene (e.g., attach the Start Point to a character's hand, and the End Point to an enemy).

Customizing the Electricity

The Inspector for the Lightning node offers immense control over the fractal math generating the arc:

  • Branches: Increases the number of forks splitting off from the main bolt.
  • Jaggedness: Controls the chaotic zigzag of the bolt. A low value looks like a smooth plasma beam; a high value looks like chaotic static electricity.
  • Thickness: Controls the core width of the beam.
  • Core Color & Glow Color: By default, lightning is white with a blue glow. You can change this to red/orange for "Sith" lightning, or green for magic spells.

Animation (Phase)

By default, the lightning bolt is static. To make it constantly writhe and strike like living electricity, you must animate its phase.

  1. In the Inspector, locate the Phase parameter.
  2. You could keyframe this manually from 0 to 100, but there is a better procedural way.
  3. Right-click the word "Phase".
  4. Select Expression.
  5. A small text box will appear. Type time * 0.5 and press Enter.

This tells the engine to constantly increase the phase value automatically based on the current frame number, resulting in infinite, chaotic animation without requiring a single keyframe.