i'm looking for a solution to create rays of sunlight which break trough voluminous heavy clouds, similar to e.g. the hippogriff flying scene in harry potter and the prisoner of askaban, for those who have seen the movie .... can this be done in vue 5 infinite and has anyone tried?

The only way I've done this is by using photo's of real skies on alpha planes for the background, which looks great, but you need to find a suitable sky and take a picture of it first. You might try making clouds that are seperate from the normal vue clouds, like that are 3D objects in the scene so they show up in the wireframe x y z and main camera views, and then use volumetric sunlight. that would probably work but would take ages to render. hope this helps Ben

Volumetric light is good in Vue 5 Infinite:

But, like Ben said above, you'd have to come up with 3D clouds, or a cloud shaped invisible mask, to make the light beams.

_jc...'Art Head Start' e-book
.......Art Head Start.com site
Art knowledge and skills for digital artists. Free chapter on lighting, Vue tutorials and models.

Try using cylinders for the shafts of sunlight. With the right materials and settings it could look very realistic and save a lot of render time too.

Good tip! That sometimes works well, though cones would be more realistic, i think. I hope the next versions of Vue have better 3D clouds.

_ jc 'Art Head Start' e-book
Art Head Start.com site Art skills for digital artists. Free lighting chapter, tutorials.

Message edited on: 01/23/2006 11:39