Well... I promised that I would make a tut on how to make light rays coming thru the clouds since i figured it out on my own after asking the question in the forum, so here it is. Please bear with me cause this is my first tutorial for Vue I've ever done. Hope I cover all the bases.

First... open up a new file and select a dark sky, preferably one where the sun isn't shining into the camera. I've been collecting a few of the free ones from the Free Area and there's a few that are worth downloading. See the previous message with some links to these free atmospheres.

Next... add your objects and perfect your scene. In this example, I just created a simple terrain and added a water plain to it.

Now, when you got all your objects placed in the scene the way you want them, add a cylinder from the primitives menu.

Now, shape your cylinder until it's a long and tall pole, like shown in the example above.

Now that you've got the cylinder, make it the current object by highlighting it in your object panel and load the "Light Beam" material from the "Special Effects" section of your material library.

Now you want to copy and paste a few of these cylinders in a cluster. 3-5 is a good choice, but make sure they are in a group. Use CTRL-C to copy the current cylinder. Move it aside and then press CTRL-V and you'll notice that the new cylinder appears where the last cylinder was. You can do this as many times as you want. I'm sure you could also use the "Replicate/Scatter" command too, but I find this method alot easier.

Now you want to group all these cylinders together so you can manipulate them as one. Select the first cylinder and then hold the Shift key down and select the last cylinder to highlight them all... you'll notice that now your selection square in your views will cover all the cylinders.

Now, you want to rotate the cylinders a bit askew. Remember you can do whatever you want. Personally, I find that trying to point the tops towards the light source as much as possible will produce the best results.

Now you can stretch and scale the cylinders as much as you want, but make sure to move the cylinders so the bottoms of them disappear below the horizon line.

Do a test render to see if the light from the cylinder "beams" is visable enough, if it isn't edit the material in the "Material Editor" and choose the "Effects" tab and increase the "Ambient" and/or the "Luminous" settings until you get a good "Beam" look.

Attached Link: http://membres.lycos.fr/adosnon/GB-echange_atmospheres.htm

And VIOLA... you have light beams coming thru the clouds. Looks pretty good too... I'm sure that you can find all kinds of good uses for this little trick and I'm sure that some of you more advanced users already knew about this and could probably come up with a better way of doing it then I did, but I felt I just had to contribute something to this wonderful forum. Oh... and by the way... for those that didn't see the previous message on where to get some good skies, check the Vue Free Area for some and Guitta gave a good link of a collection created by Pascal Mari(Kiki) for Vue 2 that will also work with Vue 4. I included the clickable link in this (hope that's okay Guitta). Hope this helps and let me know if it does! -=> Jim! <=-

Thanks Jim, it's great to see all this with screenshots:-). For Vue 4 users, you also can read the tutorial for light beams out of the clouds pages 260 to 263 in your User Guide and Vue 2 Users (if you have the User Guide) pages 147/148). Guitta

Thanks for taking time to do this. You did a great job for a first vue tut, easy to follow. :)

Thanks so much, this is a very helpful tut :)

Thanks Jim for the excellent tutorial. I'll have to try this out. Charles :)

this works perfectly!!! awesome dude, i owe you i know.

This looks great and will be very helpfull for many users, as the question for lightbeams comes regulary back. Can you please add a link to this tutorial to our tutorial database, so everybody can find it later. Thanks very much, Guitta