Greetings! Discovered a little problem when working on this months contest: I have a spaceship model that has a bounding box a little larger than the whole model do to the shape/size of a particular mesh (everything ungrouped, too. I've made a "laser" from a round parallel light set to volume light/infinite light/no drop off. This light is placed in front of the ship's cannon, which is within the model's bounding box. When rendered, the laser light only appears outside of the bounding box. Other lights - radial/spot- seem to work fine within the box but not the parallel light. Any ideas?

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=24368&Start=61&Sectionid=0&Form.Search=Alleycat169

I'm not sure why that is happening (especially if you ungrouped the model). One possible work around for it would be to use a long cylinder textured with one of the "Soft glow" textures. Change the diffuse, volume and ambient colors to suit your taste, then turn up the ambience and transparency a bit. This makes a nice Laser cannon effect. Here's an example from my gallery.

Sounds like the light beam is catching a shdow from the ship, select the light, enter the MAT lab not the light lab, then turn off the Receive Shadows option.

Bingo! The light was catching shadow (silly thing is, I knew that ;-) ) Thanks for the help. btw, alleycat, cool "Trap!"

Good call Clay! I never would have thought of a light being cancelled out by a shadow. It's something that doesn't happen in the "real world". It usually works the other way around. ;-) btw, Thanks for the compliment Nukeboy.

This happened to me once before, and I completely forgot the implications. I've only been at this a couple of months, so I'm soaking up every titbit you folks (the professionals :-) ) can give me. Hopefully tomarrow, I'll have this month's challenge up for you to discect/scrutinize..etc. In the meantime, (and FTP allowing, the new site will be up in a couple of days) this is me: http://www.surfari.net/~nukeboy cheers!