Sure, it’s a long line of mischief. Those early filmmakers painted each frame, a slow, glorified type of hand‑made shader that had to be perfect before the projector spun. Now I’m tweaking a few dozen lines of GLSL, and every value has to fall into place exactly, or the bolt looks like a drunk cat. The precision is the same, just the tools and the deadlines are different. If you ever need a lightning bolt that feels like a symphony, let me know – I’ll make it as messy or as clean as you want.

Yeah, the trick is to make it *almost* perfect and then sprinkle in the chaos that real lightning never obeys. First, throw in a small amount of normal‑map noise that’s not exactly orthogonal—just a few degrees off, so the light bounces off different planes. Then mix in a second, slightly phase‑shifted noise layer for the flicker; don’t let it be a pure sine wave—use Perlin or Voronoi to get those jagged spikes. Add a quick, low‑frequency time offset per vertex so the bolt never looks rigid. Finally, a dash of motion blur or a subtle glow gradient will soften the edges and give it that hand‑painted bleed. Keep the math clean, but let the visual “mess” be the real artist.