Download on Patreon
Bolts of lightning, forking electrical arcs, intense sparks... Electricity is just one of those rare primal things that is entrancing and dangerous. Time to make an electromagnetism sandbox.

While working on this VJ pack, Lightweaver proposed doing a collab release. He had been working on the ZAPPER FFGL effect, which finds the edges in your footage and has sparks travel along them and then lightning arcs jump between the sparks. As is characteristic of his top notch plugins, it’s well designed and a ton of fun to play with. So I’m thrilled to include the ZAPPER FFGL effect in this VJ pack. Minimum version of Resolume required: 7.3.0. More info below.

The geometry nodes in Blender can be used to make some amazingly realistic electricity. I was just about to dive into tutorials when I stumbled across some really well designed prebuilt setups over on Superhive. I ended up using the Lightning Tools, Lightning Bolts Generator, and the Electricity Fx Pack V3 and then customizing each of them to the various ideas I wanted to explore. Each of these prebuilt setups had their own pros and cons, and so I leaned on what each of them excelled at to experiment and uncover new territory. It was amazing to work on these scenes with realtime playback and tweak the simulations quickly. Blender is vast!

For the Lightning scenes, after the main bolt struck then I wanted all of the branches to quickly disintegrate, even if it was a bit of stylistic interpretation. So I had to do two render passes of each scene so that I had this freedom when I got to the compositing step in AE. I also applied some slow truck motion to the camera in Blender so that the Lightning scenes had some parallax motion to give it more intriguing life.

For the Arc scenes, even with a prebuilt setup it was difficult to control the electrical arcs to create the ideas I had in mind. Also I noticed that I could see when the random seed repeated itself. And since electrical arcs are so erratic, I decided to do some variations where the seed value was incremented every 1 second, which looks great with a 120 BPM for music. Fill two needs with one deed.

Since there is so much intense movement in electric arcs, I decided to render all of these clips at 3840x2160 at 120fps and so there is plenty of room to slow them down dramatically. This was my first time working in-depth with the EEVEE render engine exclusively and it’s quite refreshing to work with a real time render engine. For the future I’ve learned that when I don’t need global illumination via the Cycles render engine then it’s probably wise to first work in EEVEE. Sometimes I enjoy being a bit late to the party with tech because then the tech is fully mature by the time I jump onboard.

At several points in the past I’ve tried to tackle this theme but always had trouble with Maya holding me back. And so after years of trying to switch over to Blender, I think that process has finally taken root, strangely thanks to LLMs. The reason it’s been so difficult is that I’ve worked in Maya for 20 years now and so I have technical muscle memory which makes it difficult to switch over. I often know exactly what technical steps I need to accomplish but can't figure out how to replicate it in Blender. So that used to mean stopping what I'm doing, searching Youtube for a tutorial, and then picking up my flow again. But now I can just describe what I'm trying to do into an LLM and then it'll tell me the steps. I realize LLMs appropriately get a lot of hate, but golly are they transformative for artists who just want a tool to streamline the idea that they want to still make with their own hands. This is transformative for me because sometimes there are small steps that completely stop me in my tracks, such as the delete key not functioning and instead needing to hit the X key in Blender. So the cycle between learning and experimenting is much shorter, which therefore keeps me in the creative flow zone.

After rendering out all the Blender scenes out to frame sequences, then I imported all of the footage into After Effects, and did some compositing. I used the BFX Map Ramp plugin to precisely remap the colors into the cyan and dark blue territory. Then I heavily used the Deep Glow plugin to add the feeling of electrically hot glowing energy. Using the Duocolor Tint Mode was vital for achieving the look that I was searching for. From there I precomped the glow and layered it on itself so that the glow gradient would be boosted without burning it out more. For the Lightning scenes, the glow does not extend past the screen edge and so you can move it anywhere you need without concern that the edges will be visible. To confirm that the glow didn’t extend past the screen edge, I learned something new about AE where I used the “adjust exposure” feature to heavily overexpose the image temporarily so that I could easily see where the glow edges ended. Also for you VJs to have lots of options for jamming, I rendered out both the Base and Glow versions of all the scenes.

Once again I’ve hit the ceiling of what the H264 codec can technically handle due to working at 3840x2160 at 120fps. I anticipated this issue and so I did some render tests using the AfterCodecs plugin where I rendered out the same clip using the H264, HEVC, and DXV codecs. From there I played back each of the clips and the H264 codec displayed heavy artifacts, seemingly because it cannot decode the high rez and high fps reliably to maintain real time playback. But both the HEVC and DXV codecs played back smoothly and without artifacts, but the DXV files were seriously huge. So for the first time I decided to rely on the HEVC codec using the “Slow” encoding speed. Although the HEVC codec has a singular limitation for VJs… The Resolume Alley app will playback/convert any video clips using the HEVC codec just fine. But the Resolume Avenue/Arena app will not even import any video clips using the HEVC codec. For this reason I’ve long hesitated to use the HEVC codec, but this VJ pack has tied my hands. While the render times are slower, the good news is that the quality of the gradients is better and the file sizes are smaller with the HEVC codec. I have the power!

--------------------------------------------------

New Plugin: ZAPPER ⚡️⚡️⚡️

Yo!! Lightweaver here :)

I reckon it was a cosmic coincidence that Isosceles and I both decided to dive into electricity for our next release. After finding out he was making a pack of electrical arcs I knew we had to make this a collab!

My plugin is called ZAPPER and it creates electrical sparks and arcs!

I had a very specific vision of electrical arcs and sparks tracing around the footage, and I spent a lot of time fine tuning the look. ZAPPER detects the edges of your footage and spawns glowing sparks of electricity that run along them as if they were a power line. Arcs of electricity are then created between these sparks, with their own set of controls deciding their behaviour and look. You can create small and subtle arcs or go for full on tesla coil action!

There's a few interesting controls that change the way Zapper behaves. Shower causes the sparks to sometimes fly off the line that they're running along. Gravity and Shower Velocity dial in how this happens. Cranked up it looks like welding sparks or a broken power line.

With real electrical arcs, heat rises causing them to bow upwards the longer they're active. The Heat parameter emulates this behaviour and causes an upwards bend that gets more extreme the longer the arc lives, which you can fine tune with the Life parameters.

There's also a toggle called Motion, this causes the electricity to only appear when motion is detected.

This release with Isosceles is v1.0 of Zapper. Any future updates will be hosted on my Patreon page inside the Backer vault. Install Instructions are Included in the Manual as well as a detailed explanation of each parameter.

Happy Zapping!

Ben // Lightweaver

--------------------------------------------------

Released October 2026