ok i need to make a stream of lightning for an effect im trying to get but i really dont want to have to manipulate 50+ splines to do it is there an easyer way to do it?

If memory serves my good friend Eugene put put together a tutorial on creating lightening and all I can remember was that it was a novel approach. Don't know were it is at -- have you searched the forums? Another good friend of mine, John3d, would probably have something as well as he has experimented with all kinds of effects. Definitely search the forums and the forum archives. When I need lightning, well, I'm spoiled; I have After Effects.

Cheers,
Rusty

How many manipulations are acceptable? 45? 20? None?

If you've splined your basic lines you can use the Distortion tool to stretch and skew and otherwise adjust the splines.

I'm lazy. So depending on the desired effect I might just find a nice pic of Lighting on the internet in the public domain, apply that image to a grid and scale and stretch that grid to get the effect I need.

If you are a programmer you could probably program the effect in 50+ lines of code:
In 1994 Nelson Chu did that in the Pascal programming language. (source code available online)

You could use javascript to create a realtime lightning effect placed on top of your images and display them on a webpage:
Gonna haffa try this one myself

Materials could be used to create the effect in A:M without using any splines.
Most likely you would have to use Fractal Sum to gain the effect and then animate the material over time.

You could create a rough but shiny material, apply that to a plane and shine a light against it (from top to bottom).

Perhaps the easiest way of all would be to draw the lightning in pencil on paper.
It'd take considerable time to scan it in and then make the resulting images negatives of the original images.

...and you could hire someone to do any of these for you.

Be careful though, in the time it takes to experiment you could probably just manipulate the 50+ splines.

The tutorial Rusty mentions by Eugene is: here.

Note that others have added nice examples and even a project file in their responses to the tutorial.

Back in the day you could make a spline, set it to lines only in the toon settings, set it to glow, high randomness, and voila, you had lightning. This was back in 99 though so I'm not sure all the options are still available, but it's certainly simple.

Just off the top of my head I would try an animated material with a gradient with transparency. But how you solve this will depend on how you want the lightning to appear in your movie. There are lots of ways to do it depending on the effect you're after.

But you could also try a simple version of the solution you have in mind, make a quick render of it and post it here for feedback. That might work better both for your progress and to get more helpful comments.

IT'S... ALIVE!

Click to view attachment

Not quite lightning, but similar. This is a 3-point spline, rendered as line, with randomness and scale varied, with glow varied.

Click to view attachment

this looks like something you could use
http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/~s_bruc...htningBolt.html

"Manipulate" how? If you're talking about natural lightning (as opposed to the continuous stuff from a jacob's ladder or van de graf generator), it doesn't move. Electricity finds a path and discharges. Then, if there are repeated strikes, they follow the same path.

I usually just make a snaking string of spline segments, peak them all, and add glow. Then I turn them on and off.

Actually I'm looking for continuous arcs, like a jacob's ladder, or Tesla coil arc, though branching between "plates". Actually the plates will be the wings of one of the Old Ones in HP Lovecraft's novel "At the Mountains of Madness". I started this after participating in one of the image contests where I modelled the "old ones" city from the novel.

In the thead that got this started, I describe how the wings might be used:

At the Mountains of Madness thread...

So multiple arcs among the five wings start up a sort of plasma drive and off the thing flies! Here's how I described what I imagined in the earliest thread:

I do have After Effects, but I'm not up to speed on using it yet. I'm open to whatever will get the visual result I'm after with reasonable effeciency.