Can I give a spline volume?

[Anonymous]

Before anyone cringes, I'm not even sure that's the question I'm asking. I simply don't know the words in this case.

I wanted to try lightning. Found a couple of tutorials, neither of which worked completely (although I did learn things), but I realized then that they'd be for still shots anyway (and a still shot I can draw the lightning bolt on). Based on serendipity, I found three scripts to generate spline-based lightning bolts. One crashed, one worked, and one (woo-hoo!) generates an animated lightning bolt (and keeps generating as long as I keep hitting the button. Tyson Ibele, if you ever see this, you're a genius in my book :).

But the 'bolts' are splines. Look great, but there's nothing set up to make them look like jaggedy strings of energy (and my ship's Tesla Cannon should be like unto the Wave Motion Gun).

I want to take the resulting splines and make them look like actual bolts of energy. Problem is, I'm not even sure what question to ask; "give the splines soft-edged volume so they look like ravening energy" covers it, but doesn't sound very Max-y. If it's something I'd need to do in Rendering rather than Modeling, just point me there.

(And googling variations on "make this spline thick and energetic" netted me nothing. I did try.) I have no problem googling for tutorials and pointers, but I'm curious what the keywords are for what I want to do.

Thanks!

Davey

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

To give a spline volume look in the spline's rendering menu under the modifiers.

Select enable in renderer and enable in viewport. Then just play with the settings to get the volume that you want. You can always convert it to a poly and edit it that way if the spline menu isn't giving you enough control, for example then stick a turbosmooth modifier on it.