The way I did that pic, I rendered the bottom layer of spheres in Maya, the took it to Photoshop and duplicated them and flipped them to the top of the image, then took it into Maya and canvas painted the lightning, clouds,etc. Then took that to Photoshop and added the lights at the ends of the lightning strokes plus did a little color editing through blending layers, and voila- one weird picture

Darkon

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Red bellows of flame have blackened my stones
Convulsing my frame and cracking my bones
Hell's dragons of steel who roar in their chains
Crawl into my caves to suck out my veins.....

-The Mountain P.F.M.

Wow. Very nice!!

I like those surreal images...

Originally posted by THX1138
How do you make the lightning look so natural in form? Every time I try to draw lightning, it looks sick.

Originally Posted by

Sounds like KPT effects to me ..

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adldesigner
Caracas, Venezuela
Hell .. not gone perse, but with a certainly lower post count per day.

Nope, lightning was done in Maya canvas painting

Darkon

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Red bellows of flame have blackened my stones
Convulsing my frame and cracking my bones
Hell's dragons of steel who roar in their chains
Crawl into my caves to suck out my veins.....

-The Mountain P.F.M.

Hmm .. interesting then ..

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adldesigner
Caracas, Venezuela
Hell .. not gone perse, but with a certainly lower post count per day.

Good job on the lightning man!

I'm at work doing some PFX lightning at 5K res (5000pixlesX5000pixels) for a shot we are doing.

To get ANY of the default Maya lightning brushes to go where you want them, is a MAJOR task, so I'm glad to see that there are folks out there willing to take the time to push Maya to it's limits

Good job!

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Israel "Izzy" Long
Motion and Title Design for Broadcast-Film-DS
izzylong.com

So, did you draw the lightning by hand or does the Maya program lay it out for you and make it look natural. By the way, the lightning is what caught my eye the first time I saw it. Awsome job!!

I wonder how it was done for movies way back when it had to be optically printed on film. Im guessing they drew it by hand.

Basically when I canvas paint I keep two boxes open, Visor for my brushes and Edit Template Settings which is where you can change the brush characteristics. With canvas painting you are only given one undo- Canvas/Canvas Undo, so you have to make sure everything is right. I go back and forth between making a stroke and undoing it and changing my brush settings a lot. You can take snapshots of your canvas, but I never bother

And thanks for the kind comments ragecgi

Darkon the Incandescent

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Red bellows of flame have blackened my stones
Convulsing my frame and cracking my bones
Hell's dragons of steel who roar in their chains
Crawl into my caves to suck out my veins.....

-The Mountain P.F.M.

Ah! Now I got the Monty Pyton theme stuck in my head! Get it out! Get it out!!

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- Chris L. Harkins -

Oh great, now it's playing in my head too! See what you started

Darkon

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Red bellows of flame have blackened my stones
Convulsing my frame and cracking my bones
Hell's dragons of steel who roar in their chains
Crawl into my caves to suck out my veins.....

-The Mountain P.F.M.