I'm sure I've seen something about this before, but not sure if it was here or not, but is there a way to make light beams show down thru clouds like you would see on a stormy day just before the rain sets in?

I've been trying this for ages. I just can't do it. I mean I am a bit of a newbie (6 months), but I've reasonable success in Terragen, but not Vue (or Bryce for that matter). There must be a way using maybe (and I'm thinking off the top of my head here) using a spot light? what do I know, though.

You know I actually am in the middle of trying that, I will post what I did and show you...Sharen

Do a search in this forum for messages with subject "light beam", you will find lots of threads:-) Guitta

I think I figured it out on my own... may have to post a quick tut on it as soon as I'm finished with my latest piece!

You mean like this???

Basically, it's done by applying a material called light beam to a cone or a cylinder... Also experiment with the different skies till you find one that has the right contrast...

You can increase the striation effect of the light rays by lowering the function scale of the color production... I for the above picture I changed it to .5

and this is the mapping to the cone and the positioning against the other elements in the scene... Hope this helps... :)

DOH! I just posted my version but tradivoro's version is much better with his cool texture he found! So I deleted it. :)

My only other contribution that I had that would apply to T's method is to use a boolean difference to clip off the top of the cone. If you do that you can better focus the cones light to the breaks in the clouds. Here is a picture I did to show the clipping of how it looks on the sky. :)

Right, thanks for bringing that up NightVoice... If you look at the picture on top, I forgot to place the point light in the cone for more brightness... I don't know that the boolean different would make much a difference, since the clouds brightness would diffuse the effect fo the lightbeam texture, making it seems as though the light is coming from those spots.... Anyway, here is the brighter version... :)

Looks good. I think it would go either way depending on the type of clouds. Bright cloud, just brighten it up. Dark clouds, might need the boolean cut depending on the rest of the atmostphere. Your way probably will work best in most situations. Just have to experiment with the different methods. All this is pretty cool to learn for down the line. :)