Dear Friend: Can someone please tell me how I can set the settings to get God-Rays into Vue 6 Esprit? I am already using a noise node cloud atmosphere without luck. Thanks. Sincerely, Fidelity2.

I believe "official" Godrays are only available in Vue 6 Infinite and Xstream?

You can fake them using primitive cones and a fuzzy, glowing material placed under holes in your clouds.

Godrays are availabl in Esprit (only Easel does not have them).  The best way to learn about them is to load one of the preset godray atmospheres and then change/edit the cloud materials a bit. 

Thanks Peggy - in that case, Mark Caldwell came up with a good Godrays trick - punch holes in your clouds with transparent cylinders - Godrays seem to work best with heavy clouds and smaller well-defined holes. Use volumetric lighting, spectral atmosphere (available in your version I guess), a wide angle lens and with the camera rather distant.

If you get "grainy" clouds (lack of enough samples), turn up that "Quality Boost" slider in the Spectral Atmosphere "Sky, Fog and Haze" tab to about 2. Mess with the sun angle Vs the cloud holes, size of holes, angle of cylinders. Of course the darker your scene, the more your Godrays will stand out.

Godrays appear mostly when there are a lot of clouds in the sky, but where there also some holes in the layer. Clouds have to be very dense, and they have to cast shadow (this has to be ticked in the clouds tab of the atmosphere editor), 40% shadow is good enough. And of course you need to ticvk the godrays box in the sky fog & haze tab of the atmosphere editor.
When you have those clouds with some holes in it, place your sun near the holes, but it must'nt be completely out of the cloud layer. 
You may not see the result in preview mode, you might need to use "final" to see the effect.
And if your clouds are grainy, do as jc suggested.

When I started learning about godarays I also assumed that the sun had to be above or indside the cloud layer,but upon further experimentation I find it does not.As show in the following images.i am not entirely sure what else it could be based on, I am thinking maybe arial perspective???Or how it is casting godrays at all in fact,but I have several in an upcoming collection with the sun set far below the cloud layer and all casting pretty strong rays..baffling to me honestly.

and here is a screen with my sun placement.

...and finally here is the atmosphere if anyone wants to desect it and "shed a bit of light" on the matter(;

Here's a link to my tutorial that Bruno mentioned and another one that may help:

[Punching Holes in the Sky (God Ray Tutorial)

](http://impworks.blogspot.com/2006/11/punching-holes-in-sky.html)

Vue 6 Tutorial: Cloud Layer Sculpting

"When I started learning about godarays I also assumed that the sun had to be above or indside the cloud layer,but upon further experimentation I find it does not."

Actually the sun is above the clouds. Always:-) Well, almost always - if you point the sun upwards it will be below the clouds, which could lead to some "interesting" effects....

The sun is an infinite-type light, and as such the only thing that matters is the direction it's pointing. You can place an infinite light anywhere in a Vue scene (I've never tried placing one below ground, but even that should work).

Hope that helps,

Cheers,
Diolma

The distance of the  sun from the camera is important too. Move the sun away from the scene and the lighting will change, it will be darker. The sun doesn't have to be in the cloud layer hole, actually if it is, you won't see godrays. You need to have clouds in front , above or below the sun so some rays will be blocked and others will be cast, and the latter will create the godrays effect.

So basically the formula that Vue   uses is to simply make the sun a volumetric light then? I was under the assumption that it had to be behind something like pointing a spot through a window or the like...I never did quite understand the science behind it all.

I stand corrected. I never knew that the distance rom the camera affected the sun's brightness:-(

Will play with that later:-)

Cheers,
Diolma

took me quite a while to get them really good. I saved the atmosphere and use and abuse it often. Playing with the sun's angle is fun. You can get some real dramatic effects.

Yeah,some really funky stuff can happen when interested enough to play:D

Some Great Tuts here, Much Appreciated!!!