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INTRODUCTION Thank you for purchasing Thor, the god of lightning plug-ins. Although we have made every effort to make Thor intuitive and easy to use, this User Guide is designed to help you get the most out of Thor.Thor is a Lightwave extension which allows you to create a variety of electrical effects such as lightning bolts. More precisely, Thor is a procedural modeler that generates and animates a three dimensional LightWave primitive representation of a lightning bolt which spans the space between a source conductor and a target conductor. The source is the starting point of the lightning and is located at the center of the top of the primitive's bounding box. Correspondingly, the target is the end point of the lightning and is located at the center of the bottom of the bounding box. A lightning bolt is constructed from electrical segments. An electrical segment is a three dimensional point-to-point arc of electricity. The segments along the path from the source to the target are called the main segments; non-main segments are called secondary segments. A segment which is connected to segments below itself is called a parent segment.
Typically, at the beginning of an animation, the bolt is invisible. As the animation progresses, the lightning expands from the source. At the end of the animation, the lightning has reached its target. (Scientific note: as a user pointed out, this is the opposite of what really happens in nature, however, most people expect to see the lightning travel in this fashion, from source to target.) Finally, as we want to continually improve Thor, we would like to hear from you. Please send us your comments and show us what you have done and what you would like to do with this unique tool. We will endeavor to incorporate your suggestions into subsequent versions and to feature the best work with Thor on our website. This guide assumes that you are familiar with Lightwave. Add this plugin just as you would add any other plugin in both Layout and Modeler. In Layout, when the main frame slider is moved, Thor does not calculate new lightning bolts. This will make it appear as if the lightning bolt is not animated. Make a preview instead. Layout uses the last rendered/previewed lightning bolt in the layout. NOTE: Also, when a scene is saved and then reloaded the lightning bolt will not be found and Lightwave will prompt a question asking if the there is an alternate object to load. Say no and Lightwave will replace the object with a NULL object and everything will work fine.
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