How would you do lightning?

[CarbonBlue]

I'm not talking about lightning itself, but the flashes from lightning in a dark interior at night. I'm thinking of creating 3 images per flash animation:
-one that is dark with normal lighting where you can barely see anything
-one that is super-bright
-one that is half-bright, like daytime brightness

In renpy I'd start off on the dark image and then play like 6 frames where I pick one of the 3 images at random. I haven't quite gotten to that scene yet to test it, so I'm wondering if there's a better way. The rendering time shouldn't be significant because these are relatively sparse scenes.

 

[polywog]

 

[Rich]

I'm not talking about lightning itself, but the flashes from lightning in a dark interior at night.

Interesting question. I sounds to me like the image set that you're talking about would probably suffice - the main question is going to be the sequence and timing of their presentation in Ren'py. I'm not sure whether choosing the images randomly would be the best approach, since you could end up with combinations that looked odd.

If it were me, I'd probably start by trying something like:

1. Bright for two beats
2. Dark for one beat
3. Medium for one beat
4. Dark for one beat
5. Medium for one beat
6. Back to dark

(Basically, big flash followed by two smaller ones.)

No idea how that'd really look, but that's at least where I think I'd start.

Either that, or find some old horror movie and see what they do. LOL

 

[CarbonBlue]

Yeah I should have specified it wouldn't be entirely random. I'd just choose different patterns of half/bright/half/dark/bright/dark, etc.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

Should there be a seizure warning?
I demand that your lighting be super bright and crazy!