When I created this image I wanted to create streams of light cascading through the water. Although I used volumetric spot lights I didn't see any beam when I rendered the image. I've read the Vue 4 manual, but I still don't get it. Any pointers?

You could try using a quadratic spotlight (volumetric) and bump the shadows up to 2-300% (once you get to 100% you have to enter the values manually). Then you can fiddle with light gels to break up the rays or use some primitives inside the light cone but outside the cameras field of view. Hope this helps some Rich

Is that how you did the lighting for your sword scene, Axe? It was very effective! jon

Yeah, that's pretty much how I did it. I gave a more detailed description of the lighting in my challenge entry thread. Rich

I'm not exactly sure what caused the "separation" of the beams here, but I think it has something to do with the reflections from the water surface, and the camera angle. The top picture is a volumatric quadratic spotlight with a cone angle of 7 and a power of 400. The bottom one is a couple of Vue cone primitives with that "Glowing Moon" material from the "Glowing materials" library applied to them. They look very similar, but the one with the glowing materials instead of the volume light rendered alot faster. Glowing materials are good for things like this, but the down side is that you can't do a "resume render" with a glowing material in your scene.

WOW, this is great. Sharen