Creating a Lightning Storm

You've made a cloudy sky; now you need to add a lightning storm to it. Fortunately, there's an effect devoted to just that. This is one of those effects that you can tweak for hours and still get new and interesting results:

1.	Apply Effect > Render > Advanced Lightning to the Sphere layer, and use the following settings for the effect: Origin: 0.0, 120 Direction 320, 120 Glow Radius: 35 Glow Opacity: 50% Glow Color: #FFD200 Decay Main Core: checked Composite on Original: checked Settings for the Advanced Lightning effect at time 0:00
2.	Still at time 9:29, add a Conductivity State keyframe to the effect with a value of 15.
3.	Go to time 3:00, and change the Conductivity State value to 0. The Sphere layer using the Advanced Lightning, Hue/Saturation, and Fractal Noise effects

Currently your so-called Sphere layer looks nothing like a sphere and just fills the comp window in 2D. You'll make the layer live up to its name in the next section.