How to make a 3D lightning special effect?

Saran

Hi guys, I have a question:

How can I make special effects in Godot, like lightnings?

I checked Google and there was something similar to this in an Unreal Engine (using beam emitters or whatever it is called), but how to do it in Godot?

I mean something like this (first 3 seconds): https://youtu.be/ywd3lFOuMV8?t=779

As you see, it needs to work no matter how far target is from the source. Without cheap workarounds, such as scaling lightnings.

TwistedTwigleg

I do not think there is anyway to get something quite like the video in Godot, at least not yet. Perhaps with particle trails and some form of particle attraction, which as far as I know is not implemented in Godot 3.0, you can create a similar effect.

You also may be able to write a custom shader that manipulates the vertices of a mesh to curve and displace so it looks somewhat like lighting, but I have little experience with shaders so I have no idea how feasible that is.

I would say your best bet is to make a similar visual effect using a something like the method in this tutorial on YouTube. Granted using this method will need some clever workarounds to get it working with varying distances from target to source.

Saran

Thanks, I also found one interesting implementation with Godot's shaders However I'm not sure how efficient it is

TwistedTwigleg

@Saran said: Thanks, I also found one interesting implementation with Godot's shaders However I'm not sure how efficient it is

Ah, cool!

I have not looked at the code, but if it is a shader then it should be fairly fast unless the shader is doing a bunch of unnecessary calculations. As far as I know, shaders in Godot run on the GPU, so even semi-complicated shaders should run nice and fast without slowing down the CPU.

mujtaba-io

https://gameidea.org/2024/08/28/thunder-lightning-strike-shader-for-godot/ this is my implementation of lightning. Mentioning here so someone might find it helpful if they come here.