Nature · Study 034
Lightning Storm
Jagged lightning forks down over a rooftop skyline, built by recursive midpoint displacement. Click to call a strike where you point.
What you're looking at
A bolt starts as a straight line from cloud to ground. The line is split at its midpoint, the midpoint is knocked sideways by a random amount, and the same is done to each half, seven levels deep. Some midpoints also spawn a thinner side branch. The result is jagged at every scale, like the real thing.
The idea behind it
Actual lightning advances in steps of roughly fifty metres, as a faint leader channel hunts for a path through the air, branching as it goes. The bright flash is the return stroke that runs back up the one channel that connected.
Try this
Click or tap to bring a bolt down at the pointer. The storm also strikes on its own.
