Lightning timing

So this is a question of ridiculous minutiae, but is it possible to time the lighting on the blade to the crackle in the hum? Video for reference. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0VrHY4TF03g

Edit: that’s lightning shooting up the blade intermittently

I’m a little unsure about exactly how you want this to work, but I don’t think you actually want to synchronize it with the hum. Here are some options for synchronizing sound and effects:

  1. Use WavNum to figure out which effect is playing, time the delays in the visual effect accordingly.
  2. Use NoisySoundLevel to actually trigger the lightning based on the current volume of the sound.
  3. Use FromHumFileStyle which is explicitly made to synchronize effects with sounds, however it actually does synchronize the effect with the hum, and as I said, I don’t think that’s what you want.
  4. Use DoEffect to trigger a sound each time a lightning effect occurs.

I’m sure there are more ways, this is just what came to mind right now…

Already have something just like that in Phase 2 of the Library :wink:

I have a “bolt” version coming soon, which would run up or down the blade and just uses Transition Sound to keep the animation and sound synched. But this is the exact same concept just a different sound used.

I’m working on an interface for Overlays in addition to Special Ability Modes. I don’t have it working yet, but concept-wise it’s already built, just need a way for users to configure in the library to produce the code, hence the interface.

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Could we get an explanation in plain Proffie terms as far as what it does?

In this particular case, I did indeed mean to time the lightning effect to the hum. The hum in this instance has a sharp crackle every now and then, and ideally the lightning effect would coincide with the crackle at each interval.

But in any other case, building the font to particulars (the one above is from JayDalorian), it would be easy to use Fett’s special abilities to toggle the lightning/crackle on and off at will. If I get industrious, I might go back and do that since it would just mean rebuilding the hum and blade style.

I was just mainly wondering if there was something to adjust in the editor to affect the timing of the lightning strike, but with it being random I figure that’s not so easily done.

If its just part of the hum, it’s really hard to do, Fredrik’s suggestions are probably the best but they may not perfectly align. To keep in synch perfectly you’d need a separate sound for the effect.
Transition sounds were specifically built to give independent sounds to animations like this because there weren’t other ways to really do

How long is the hum file?
You could just make transition effect layers, each one with a delay that coincides with the crackle sound one after another. If it’s like a 10 minute hum though that would get a bit ridiculous, but something straight forward like

TransitionEffectL<TrConcat<TrDelay<*FIRST crackle timing>,crackle thing,TrInstant>,EFFECT_IGNITION>,

TransitionEffectL<TrConcat<TrDelay<*NEXT crackle timing>,crackle thing,TrInstant>,EFFECT_IGNITION>,

TransitionEffectL<TrConcat<TrDelay<*NEXT crackle timing>,crackle thing,TrInstant>,EFFECT_IGNITION>,

and so on.

Actually now that I look at that, that would run once. So doing a transition loop might be better? But that doesn’t run in sync with ignition so actually I’m not sure never mind lol.

I think using the special abilities to trigger the lightning and crackle are the best (easiest) bet at this point. It really wouldn’t be that hard to rework the hum to remove and isolate the crackle.

Sounds good, the current Lightning Mode is a flashing but I already had plans for “bolt up” and “bolt down” options. I’ll see if I can sneak some time this week for a small update, no promises though, I have 13 people staying with me, so I’m pretty occupied. If I get a chance I’ll drop a note here.

Nice, and thank you. And no rush. Always something else to tweak and work on.