Ok... by all means this should work right? Im going for the idea of some droids inspecting a broken engine or ship or what ever that thing in the middle is and i need there to be volumetric lights for the droids flash lights... I realize that in space there would no particles for the light to bounce off of... but then it would look nearly as cool.

here is a picture... with the same exact droid and light in a neutral scene and the light seems to work the way it should.

and here is a screen shot of the light settings

Go to the material properties of the light and click the little triangle at the top-middle. Turn off receive shadows.

ok well i tried that... and it did get rid of the line... but now the light just continues to go right through the ship.

Try this - turn off Infinite light and click the Gradient light on and use the Range value to set how far the light travels through the scene. The default value of 50 is most likely way too short. Also try adding some Edge Softness so that the edges aren't so hard. HTH- Dan

Then I suggest moving the ship on the right down so it's shadow doesn't fall on the light or turn off it's cast shadows setting. I kind of looks like the light doesn't fully fall on the ship but only clips the back of it which is why it looks like it goes through it.

ok... i tried both of those things and here is what i get:

Turning off infinite light makes it so the visible light is only where the actual light object is vs. wherever it projects.

and i did a test and the light does in fact go right through anything that is infront of it.

after more playing i think i finally decided what is wrong... im using the sun and there is no main sun in space. so i took out the sun and put the light back to the way i had it at the beggining. Now the light works perfectly but the spaceships are quite dark so i just need to add more droids and some globe lights.

I beg to differ, the sun is a star, and therefore resides in space. Do you have a black star field background behind the nebula? The sun should be bright and hard on any objects it touches in space...:>)

Bryce has a bug with many "volymetric" things. Volumetric lights especially. For example if you have a couple volumetric lights the shadow of one light may become a "canceling" feature on the other light. Setting volumetric light to zero intensity will still show up in the render.

there is no star feild beyond the nebula and there aren't really any nearby suns. Im trying to play with a number of variations to figure out what is best. and they definitly need to make the volumetrics better in 6.0 thanks for the input. ill post an update later in a seperate thread showing the various possibilities i have come up with. thanks

Could it be that the droid on the right is casting the sun's shadow on the volumetric light?

Sorry, I meant the droid on the left.