Hi everyone! I'm working on an image with a mirror ground and beige sky. I need to put some spot lights with volume visible, and when I render some of the reflected light rays give as a result thin black stripes. What am I doing wrong? Thanx as usual for your help

I have no idea, I've never heard that one before. Maybe Hawkfyr can help you, he knows everything.

Gee thanks::Blushes:: Hi Maga, First of all,are you also selecting "Infinite Light from the light editor? also check you Falloff( Linear,squared ,ranged, also...is your sky an infinite skyplane? ,if so , try selecting "Disable cast shadows" if it's not an infinite skyplane, try turning off cloud shadows from the sky lab under the sun/moon tab. also ( I know I say that allot) do you have anti aliasing turned on or off? as far as the reflective ground,is there something driving the bump channel that could be reflecting the lines? one more thing (I Promise) sometimes If you render in an orthogonal non perspective mode(from right,from front,etc.)it's gives weird lines, just an afterthought. these are the things I'd try first, but if it doesn't help, try posting a sample for us to see exactly what this artifact looks like. hope this helps though. Hawkfyr

Thanx Boney, thanx Hawkfyr! I will try your advice this evening when I go back home. The problem is that these lights are grouped circles, I had made a "light ball" following a tutorial and imported it. There are dozens of lights "trapped" by a wireframed sphere. I deleted this sphere and ungrouped the various circles of lights, which I put here and there. I don't ungroup them because they're too many. Antialiasing is on and it is a camera view. I don't understand what you mean for infinite skyplane. I put a preset which I changed, deleting clouds and changing colors. haze and fog are off. As lights are grouped I can't edit them. Shall I have to ungroup and edit one by one?....sigh......

Hi Maga. If you ungroup the lights but still leave them all selected, you can edit the collectivly all at once ,they will all retain the same attributes. then just regroup them after that if you really need them grouped. A sky plane can be selected from the Create menu,at the top. you will see a ground plane, a water plane, and a Sky plane , these are all infinite planes, and they go on forever. If you click and hold down the mouse button on one of these planes ,you can select a Volumetric Slab,(infinite Slab) but be prepared for a longer render, anyway.. from what program did you make and import this light ball? dont get discouraged. wEll figure this out 8 )~ Hawkfyr

Dear Hawkfyr, yesterday night I ungrouped all lights, deleted a lot (too much rendering time) and I checked one of them: infinite light was on, no falloff, intensity 69. I then put them randomly. in the next rendering everything was ok, no more black lines. But I was not happy with it so I changed the camera fov from 60 to 80. I got a better view, but some black lines turned out again.... ....Another question, if I can....this scene has a bottle of nail enamel some of which has fallen on the mirror surface. I created the shape in photopaint black and 50% gray and gave a slight gaussian blur. Applied it to a lattice, lowered, smoothed. But it is not smooth when render. Any tips for this? Maybe this evening I'll upload the image if it doesn't take too much time, so you can see at last what I am talking about. Your help is always highly appreciated and welcome. Thanx again.

Hi Maga, Uploading the image would be very helpful.` Harrison2 or Lon Chaney would be the ones to ask about the lattice object,although from talking to H2,I think he said not to use smoothing too much in the terrain editor,and rather than using the clipping bracket(on the right side of the terrain canvas)try using the scaling tool on the edit pallet. However I know a good lattice starts out as a good grayscale image,so perhaps you used to much Gaussian blur in PhotoPaint, I use PhotoShop5 but I suspect they are similar, I would Ask Harrison2 about that stuff. By all means,.... upload the image so we can all have a look. Hope this helps Hawkfyr