Thanks a lot guys for all the tips i have received from ya all. Umm..ok i still have some problems here,this is a frame from my Toyota RAV4 animation which I did in Carrara,as you can see there is no indication of light on the head lamp and the street light,I used spotlight on the head lamps and street lights(I grouped the two spotlights with the head lamps) but they didn't work. Please does anyone know how I can make the car's headlights appear to be lighted? You can see that it appeared to be turned off and this is wrong because since this is a night acene,the lights should be on. Pls I need some tips on how to go about this,I've been trying to figure it out all day without success.

Try the "Anything Glows" extension.

Have you tried the light cone effect (look under the Effects part of the spotlight in the properties drawer) and/or using the glow channel in some of your shaders and/or adding glowing objects at the point where the light is supposed to originate (and you could amplify the glow with the Aura scene effect)? Guess it depends on whether you need to have visible light beams.

Just a guess, i think it's because the glass of the headlights casts shadows, so the light can't pass through it . If you disable their "cast shadows" tickbox in the properties tray, does that help ?

I tried the light cone this time and it somehow gave me a little bit of what I am looking for,you can notice that the two spotlights did not originate from the headlamps. I placed them both on the head lamps and grouped them but they drift apart the moment I play the animation,apart from grouping how else do i keep the spotlights attached to the headlamps? Thanks,I guess i am asking too much but,hey,I think i got a bog bone stuck in my throat(Gotta tone down one of them headlights,looks like a wide laser beam)

Hi Grafikdon, I don't know if this is true for Carrara, but Ray Dream's volumetric lighting effects cannot be viewed through transparent objects (a program bug). In your rendering above, both of the light cones appear to originate from outside of the vehicle's headlights. If you moved the spotlights into the headlights, the light cones would fail to render even thought the headlight lenses are mostly transparent. I've not yet downloaded "Anything Glows" which was referred to in a recent thread, but I usually use two lights within a fixture. The first is a spotlight as you have used, and the second is a bulb light to illuminate the fixture itself (high brightness and low range settings). Regarding the drift of your lights, grouping them to the rest of your model should have kept them in place. You might try an object link set to "lock", but first I would check the animation timeline to make sure that you don't have any unwanted keyframes affecting the movement of your lights. Hope something in there helps Jim Z. a.k.a. Julian Boolean

Hi Grafik, Nice to see your vision coming to fruition. I agree with everything Jim has suggested, except the idea that light cones dont go through transparent objects. They do. That and light sphere seem, in my experience, to be the only volumetric options that work with intervening objects. However, when using light cones, in this situation, you have to be mindful of the viewing angle. Certain viewing angles produce very unsatisfactory results. For example, try rendering your scene from different angles and at various distances. Anyway, almost straight on seems to work best when using some intervening transparent object. I don't know if the same is true without any kind of intervening objects.... Good Luck, .Painter

I also agree with most everything said in the last two messages but I would also add a little bit of glow to the lenses of your vehicle if it will be filmed this far away. I have had significant difficulty getting some of the lighting effects to work through objects that are transparent in Raydream but I haven't tried too many of them since I moved to C. I have full confidence that you can get the effect you're after with C. Sometimes in my animations, if I've been playing around with a lot of keyframes, some stuff just does things they shouldn't and I would suggest getting rid of your extraneous key frames or even starting over if you're not too deep into it. C can just simply get confused if you've done regrouping or added/subtracted stuff after you've started framing up things. -Kix