Car Commercial – 9 – Reference Dump

It only makes sense to have all of my reference material somewhere, so I will continually add reference as I come across it into this post.

I really like this image despite it again being low quality. We see a little variation in the lightning and get an easy feel for its shape.

Lucky for me Smarter Every Day filmed some really awesome tesla coil lightning bolts. The shapes of electricity seems so ridiculously inconsistent, sometimes large winding arcs, while others are long and relatively straight squirmy lines like this video. Others look like smooth streaks of plasma fluttering through the air.

As goofy as this video is, its got a bunch of great reference for the shaping and widths of the bolts. Even though the bolts are smaller on screen, the footage is decent and consistent. I don’t want to vary the width too much, most reference doesn’t tend to differentiate much in width, but I think its definitely necessary for an interesting looking effect. Not only that but when paired over top of one another, the layering of prims will create really cool waves of noise.

This is one of the videos I have been using for reference. I thought I was dialing noise and Offsets up too high but in reality lightning and electrical arcs are all different crazy shapes. Its worth to realize however that these shapes might still look too cartoonish or fake, despite being real, so a balance has to be struck.

Great reference for sparks!

Reference for animated electrical arcs. This is actually a very interesting phenomena, as the electricity connects, it heats up the air around it and the power of the arc itself can disturb the connections of the arc. In doing so, the arc becomes more and more unstable until it is broken completely.