I was wondering if someone had a suggestion on how to animated a bolt of electricity. I tried creating a spline and move the CVs around manually, but it just doesn't look right. I assume there is a way to do it in CHOPs by somehow causing the CVs on the curve move about in a random fashion along certain axes thus causing the spline to move. And that the glow effect may be done in COPs by applying the glow to the spline?

I can't enter any expressions either in SOP level after using edit SOP to create handles for the points I wanted to move about. It says they are not animatable!

I hope this all makes sense…

Could probably do it with an add sop.

Did you try using a Point SOP, enter an expression in transform something along the lines of:

TX+rand($F*$PT)/10
TY+rand($F*($PT+1))/10

(the $PT offset in TY is just to ensure you're getting different random numbers for x and y).

This is very primitive - it could stand gussing up a lot - and you may want to use CHOPs, exporting values to the point SOP. Just a starting point since I'm not near Houdini and I'm doing all this blind…

You may want to use poly rather than spline since electricity tends to be jagged, and as far as the glow - yup, definitely in composite. You could render the output as poly lines without having to create a surface - just use the AttributeAdd(or whatever it's called ) to add a point float attribute called “width” and set the value to 0.1 or something - this lets you control the size…

Cheers,

J.C.

what about the l-system sop?
there is a preset for lightning that can very quickly be adapted to a bolt of electricity…
there is also a tutorial in the pdf's on lightning - it talks about ways to create the lilghtning between two points etc