I'm having some difficulty getting the lights to work for me. Even at Final or Broadcast settings with 300 dpi, the lights still look rather pixelated and noisy. Any ideas on how I can fix the lights so they appear with greater clarity? I've attached a piece of the render so you can see what it looks like.

Here may be the solution to your problem.

In the top right corner of your screen there is a small window that allows you to make various changes to objects.  If you have your light selected, in that window you see "color" "softness" "spread" "falloff" and "power".   If you click on the little icon left of "falloff" you can now make various changes to that spotlight in the pop up window.  You are presented with two sliders,  "Intensity" and "quality boost".   Adjust first the "quality boost" slider all the way to the right, then adjust the intensity to you desire.  You may also want to play with the check box "show smoke or dust in light beam" option.  Hope this helps.

Thanks, that was a great suggestion. Boosting the quality of the light worked wonders. And now I get to play with the smoke and dust options too:)

I am glad that worked for you.  Have fun

You also have a "optimize volumetric lights" option in the render settings. Uncheck it for better results. It will take longer to render though.

Volumetric example scenes:

 

Currently working on a tutorial for Volumetric lighting. Volumetric lighting is a bit hard to use because there are some interactions between different parts of Vue. In general:

1. Arrange the scene so the camera is perpendicular to the spotlight beam. Difficult or impossible to see shadows if the beam hits the camera or is nearly parallel to it.

2. Keep the volumetric intensity very low, or the spotlight cone will become opaque. I use values from 1 to 3. The shadow slider is critical (Shadow & Lighting Editor) start at 100% while adjusting light and Volumetric intensity. 

3. Try changing the scale of the distribution function to get more and smaller "dust motes" in the beam. Default of 1.0 gives whisps of smoke/ Going down to 0.01 giver very small and even dust.

4. You must get the right balance between brightness of spotlight and volumetric intensity (and the Shadow slider), in order not to make the spotlight cone too bright to see any shadows in it.

5. Eliminate or dim all other scene lights. You might have to turn the sun off.

6. Read the manual.  There is vital info in there.

7. Transparent materials will cast colored shadows inside the beam. Index of Refraction is important for transparent materials. Try 1.5 to 2.5.

8. It's possible to use various gels or masks for the spotlight, but i have not done much with that yet.

9. Note that you do not need to have volumetric atmosphere turned on (in the Atmosphere Editor > Light tab) to use a volumetric light. The top example is a standard light model.

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'Art Head Start.com site Digital Art skills. Free lighting chapter, tutes, Vue models, texture pix.