Thank you for purchasing ThØr, the god of lightning plug-ins. Although we have made every effort to make ThØr intuitive and easy to use, this User Guide is designed to help you get the most out of ThØr.

ThØr is a Carrara extension that allows you to create a variety of electrical effects, such as lightning bolts. More precisely, ThØr is a procedural modeler that generates and animates a three dimensional Carrara primitive representation of a lightning bolt, spanning 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.

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 our uncompromising hacker 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.)

The remainder of this User Guide reflects the nature of two different types of users: the ones who learn a tool in a systematic fashion and those who jump right in and only refer to a manual only when needed.

The tutorials step the first group of users through the creation of several animations, such as a lightning bolt hitting a skyscraper. For the second type of user, the Reference Manual describes each of the ThØr features in detail.

This User Guide assumes that you are familiar with Carrara.

Finally, we want to continually improve ThØr, so 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 try to incorporate your suggestions into future versions and to feature the best work done with ThØr on our website.