Electric bolt

http://maxcookie.com Introduction In this video for 3ds max we'll see how to prepare a simple but effective rig to simulate electric bolt solving problems and controlling it in animation. What we'll do In Electric bolt video, we'll talk about bolt effects in 3ds max with no external plug-ins usage. A lot of users asked for it so we took time to do a tutorial to show some basic techniques. We'll see how to create a setup to simulate an animated bolt with a start point and the animatable end point done with a spline, noise modifier and controllers applied to dummy points. We'll see how to solve some animation issue to be able to animate it procedurally and manually. Then we'll talk about a big issue, bolt sub-branches, trying to find a simple way to avoid the problem created by spline usage due to its limit to have no possibility to attach secondary curves on every primary vertex.