Tiny Tina's Wonderlands - Obelisk Lightning

I created the climbing/arcing lightning effects for the Obelisk hovering over the pyramid. It was another experiment in creating VFX without using any particle systems. It is all done with vertex and material animation, relying heavily on material curve atlases for timing.

The way the lightning "searches" for the nearest stationary contact point as the obelisk rotates around them was by using a similar technique used for cel shading, where I quantized the rotation at the bottom into 4 discrete rotations. This with some randomization around those transition timings make it jump back and forth erratically during the transition between points.

It also makes it the only "cel shading" in the game that I am aware of due to the fact that Borderlands/Wonderlands does not, and never has, used cel shaded lighting.