How to create an animated Electric Arc or Lightning? I know about the technique of using a displace modifier with an animated displace object on a thin plane, but there are no "branches", no forking in the lightning.

Here is an image from Wikipedia that shows more or less what I'm thinking of:



Is it possible to achieve an 3D animated affect like this?

I have tried a few things, such as the Laplacian lightning  generator addon. However, it doesn't support animation and repeatedly generating meshes and then manually animating the visibility is a tedious.
I've experienced such need in my project long time ago. I did it with the help of Laplacian Lightning addon, too. My suggestion is:


For the varieties of lightning, you can keep on clicking generate lightning button on the Laplacian Lightning tool panel until getting enough varieties. It will generate random result each time based on the parameter setting.
For the "show time", first group them together, then simply add particle to a plane or something to emit that group, set Lifetime to 1. The Number value is quite nice for controlling the frequency.