Lightning Simulation in Unity3D
I'm trying to simulate lightning in Unity3D for the animation project. Right now I find three ways to do that.
1. Make a lightning effect in After Effects and output texture animation, then use texture sheet animation to do the lightning effect.
2. Use one simple lightning texture and use linerender and shader to simulate lightning effect
3. use particle effects and trail with noise to simulate lightning effect.
Particle system in U3D seems to be the simplest way to do that, it don't require coding or extra plugin. So I give it a shot, but it doesn't look very good. The trail is too thin.
I did some research on realistic lightning
Here's two article I found might be useful to simulate lightning effect.
http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/LIGHTNING/lightning.pdf
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ILIM/publications/PDFs/NN-CVPR03.pdf
So in these articles, they use Dielectric Breakdown Model to simulate the lightning.
Also there's a blog talking about this
http://www.gregbugaj.com/?p=636
