Greetings and Salutations All,

I would like to make a volumetric light for a poser scene. I tried the tutorial for this at Nerd3D but my results were not very good. I know there are products to buy, which in reality are not expensive, but I'd like to learn how to make one myself. I am creating a singer on stage. I'd like to make 1 light that appears to come from above her. Much like the lighting for solo artists in American Idol. I'd like to add a certain amount of a smokey effect to this light, which I know means you have to add noise, but I don't know where to plug this in. I'm also getting confused with what your supposed to add to the light and what your supposed to add to the atmosphere. Can anyone help?

Thanks for taking the time to read my post.
Viper

Like this? I used a cube and sphere for a quick render, but you can see the effect (no postwork) I'll post a screenshot of the Atmosphere node setting for this render.

There are only three things you need to do this... spotlight, backdrop, and atmosphere settings. The spotlight here had an angle start of 20 degrees, angle end of 30 degrees.

Hope it helps.

You add a noise or cloud node to your atmosphere and fiddle with the atmosphere strength til you get the effect you want. Also remember that for Volumetrics t o work there MUST be a solid object as the background. Volumetrics don't work over background images.

My atmosphere setting for the render. (Depth cue is switched off.. only the volume settings are relevant).

Thanks, Izi, for the nice simple settings.  I'd also tried some earlier
and more complex suggestions and found they didn't work well.

Thank you, Will try these later when I get home.

Happy to help!
I should have mentioned that I used a backdrop that curves upwards quite quickly behind the props.

A backdrop prop of some sort is required. A background image wont work to show the effect.

You could also do fake volumetrics as well. Obviously this won't give as complete an effect as true volumetric lighting, but it doesn't give the render time hit either. This was done using a scaled cone prop with this material applied, and a single spotlight positioned near the top of the cone pointing at the figure for the illumination. Then adjusting the Angle End value of the spotlight to get the right spread of light.

Thanks for the screen shots! I am interested in this effect, but the render time on my laptop for this effect is insane.

Oh, I forgot to say in my post that I turned of cast shadows for the cone.

Thanks, Raven, that's a good-looking substitute.

Sorry, I forgot to mention the Atmosphere Strength setting on the lights (see screenshot). This value multiplies the Volume_Density value on the Atmosphere node to give the strength of the atmosphere effect for each light. The default value for a new light is 0.02. In my render it was set to 1.0. I noticed that I had another very low intensity spotlight in the scene.. the Atmosphere Strength for that light was still at default, and it had no visible effect.

You can reduce volumetric rendering times (with some loss of quality) by increasing the distance between volume samples using the Volume_StepSize parameter. Mine was set to 1.2 inches... note that this parameter uses whatever units you have selected in your Preferences, so you have to convert that value if you are not using inches.

Some fancy (if unrealistic) stuff with my single volumetric light....