Learning How To Animate Lightning; Ep01

Some of you may know I've begun working on Susan for Cerebrawl. A little backstory on Susan is that she's a wrestler who can command lightning and electrical powers. This means I have to figure out how to animate lightning. 

I wish I had mastered how to animate lightning so I could make this post with solid advice on how to animate lightning, and initially I had planned on doing just that. As I was putting together a sample animation, I realized I had no idea on how to animate lightning. I probably sketched out and deleted about 20 animation tests before I was able to make something I was happy with and I'm still not super excited about it. I have made a few discoveries that may be useful to you guys so I'll atleast start out by jotting down everything I noticed so far in making a good looking lightning bolt. 

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Here's the first lightning animation I did. This isn't the lightning bolt I was animating for the sole purpose of this blog post but I felt I had learned a few things about animating electricity that was worth noting.

The first thing I learned about animating electricity is how to DRAW electricity. The main thing I learned here is that you have to draw as slow as you can. Allowing your hand's natural jitter to create variations in line width and direction is what you need to really get the right line quality.

Another thing I noticed is that when an electric arc or lightning bolt splits, it always splits in two. I can't say whether or not it NEVER splits in three, but it seems to happen so rarely that even if it is correct, it looks wrong

Another discovery i made about animating electricity is that you don't have to draw every frame. A lot of heavy lifting is done by color. I don't think this works in every case (I'd have to experiment a bit more) but if you want to give your animation that crackly, sparkly quality you don't have to draw every frame. Stagger each frame with a darker (or lighter) version of the previous frame

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Here's the animation I was working on specifically for this post;

When it comes to animating effects animations I find it easiest if I think of the process as transcribing an interaction of forces through time. Instead of looking at how a lightning bolt behaves in real life (which is actually quite a boring motion) I'm trying to figure out what we THINK we see when a lightning bolt strikes. 

I find it important to point out here that what you see above looks nothing like what a real lightning strike looks like. A real lightning bolt simply appears then dissipates (you MIGHT see the arc move a little bit, but it's so fast you probably won't). 

My best guess is that we understand it as being lightning because even if it doesn't look exactly like lightning, we've all seen videos of electricity arcing across power lines, or have seen a tesla coil, and have a visual understanding of what electricity behaves like. What we're trying to do here is not to look exactly like reality but exploit what humans visually understand as electricity's behavior to create an idea of lightning. 

So what are the interacting forces I'm trying to describe in the above animation? I had 3 forces I was thinking about when animating. I thought the motion as a rod being thrown into the ground, the bounce force of the impact on the ground crumpling the rod upwards, and the follow through force further crumpling the rod downwards. With that in mind, let's walk through the animation.

These two frames above are there to create the initial flash of the lightning bolt. I tried making this rectangle increase in size first, but ended up concluding it looks better when it shrinks

These two above frames show the lightning bolt smash into the ground

This is where things get complicated. The bolt has smashed into the ground, and now the ineraction of forces get complicated. First thing i do is create a splash animation around the point of impact. Next I start thinking about the apexes of the curves. On the left image, the circled areas are apexes that have moved downward. On the right the upward force from the bounce starts to effect the apexes to move upwards.

This is the part where i find animating lightning to be so complicated. some of these apexes are moving down, others are moving up, some simply move outward. Generally speaking, the apexes lower down are moving upwards as the higher apexes are being forced downward. And as the whole form crumples down, the entire form dissipates. A lot to keep track of! 

Not much to say about the above two frames. The final frames in the animation just have to dissipate well, so just follow your lines of action and continue them.

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One last point before moving on to the conclusion is that electricity seems to be one of those effects animations that look better animated at a lower frame rate. So far I've animated all my effects animations at 2/60 fps, but electric effects seem to look better at 4/60 fps. Not completely sure why this is, but something worth noting.

So far these are some of the things I've noticed about animating lightning or electricity in general. I'm hoping to make more discoveries in the future.  When I do, I'll make sure to post about them here!