Abstract
Simulation of weather scenery in computer graphics (CG) is an important issue that has a wide range of applications related to image content, such as in movies and in various landscape simulations. In general, research to date into CG lightning has focused on generating a lightning pattern by applying probability and statistics techniques, which do not consider the generating mechanism of lightning. In natural lightning, an electric discharge path (stepped leader) is generated under the influence of an electric field formed by electrification of a cloud. In this paper, we present a method that generates a lightning pattern by simulating a stepped leader in an electric field defined by placement of electric charges in a cloud and ground.
