ok, i'm doing some space battle scenes in bryce4, and i'm using cylinder lights for my phaser beams (with falloff turned off, infinite light, etc.). it looks great, but is there a way to make the infinite light stop when it hits something? i prefer the way the volumized light beams look to using stretched cylinders, so i'd like to keep using them (it took me six hours of screwing with it to get the perfect "phaser" look). am i overlooking something, or am i just plain stuck?

well, the 'infinite light' option by definition extends the volumetric lighting effect off into infinity /:^D Instead, turn off 'infinite light' and size the light manually. That's how you can control the volumetric size of a light. This works for spherical and spot lights as well. Incidentally, what settings did you use to get the phaser effect? Mine always look crappy.

which control do i use to size manually? don't i have to hold a key and use the intensity control or something? anyhow, the phaser is actually two lights, the beam core light settings are: surface visible light and infinite light enabled, falloff disabled, white light, 25 and 0 for the sliders. material properties are: no texture, white for ambient color, everything at zero except ambient and refraction (both at 100), and in the material options menu, "fuzzy" selected and everything else turned off. the beam corona's light settings are the same, except volume visible instead of surface. material settings are: the "smokey light #3" volume texture, deep orange for ambient color, diff and spec at 0, ambient at 100, base density 50, edge softness 100, fuzzy factor 105, quality 50. in the material options menu, flat shading and additive should be the only items selected, texture mapping mode should be set to random. sounds complicated, but it gives a really good result, especially up close. renders fast too (on my celeron 450).

oops! i also forgot to mention that it looks best with a 1:3 size ratio for the beam core and beam corona. (believe me, i spent six hours on it. six hours.)

you can control the size of the "volume" effect manually by resizing the actual light object, the same way that you resize a normal cylinder object. Just use the "object space" coordinate transformation tools and resize the light object along its Y axis.

oh, and the same technique workes for the "surface visible" lights, just like the "volume visible" lights. Bryce only draws in surface/volume visibility inside the area occupied by the light lattice on screen, unless you select infinite light, where it extends those volume effects off into infinity, which greatly increases render time.

oh i understand now... i was just looking in the wrong place. thanks for the info.