your lightening effect was good and i've just been playing with this longer and so just continue to practice and look at how other people do things. Go to my site and download some projects and see if you can figure out what i did if not ask
http://johnl.inform.net/
or even here
http://www.geocities.com/johnl3d/
also read the stuff at ARM
http://www.lowrestv.com/arm/
I use to read every post when it was just list mail and i learned alot and tried alot
Johnl3d the old guy