Breaking this image down into the various elements you have the particles themselves, depth of field and motion blur.  To replicate this you would need to build up your image in layers.  Paint some random dots of various sizes onto a new layer.  Duplicate, rotate and move these layers to speed up the process.  Apply gaussian blur to some layers and motion blur to others, then erase anything that you need to in order to get the result you want.  Change the colour shading and opacity of the layers containing the particles furthest from the camera.  Doing this will create an image very similar to the one you posted.

Are you trying to get the volumetric light effect from millions of dust particles, giving the smokey beam of light effect or just a random method of painting lots of dots at once?

If it is the latter then try a google search for for free starfield brushes.  These might give you the effect you are after.

Product is now in the MarketPlace.

Knockers, Keys and Locks

ockham,

Thanks for the confirmation that this is a Poser issue.  Its a very peculiar bug.  Playing around with the limits of the bug I found that I could add a one sided square from the Poser primitives props folder and scale it down to 0% so that it is invisible but for some reason because of its presence in the scene it enables the proper rendering of my key prop.  Strange indeed.

I agree, this is a good idea.  Would be useful for things like chat as well.  It would allow for meeting times to be arranged by a "universal" time reference point.  It would also help to know when Rendos business hours are relative to the users time zone.  All it would take is two times displayed at the top of the page - one for the users preference and the other displaying Rendo time.

Roughly mask of the section of shoulder that needs the shadow.  I  used the polygonal lass tool.
Put this selection on a new layer (Ctrl+J).
Lock the transparent pixels on this new layer.
Using the gradient tool choose the colour stop colours of the blend you need.  These would be the shadow colour eyedropped from a shadow area of your picture and the skin tone you want it to blend wtih.
Apply the gradient to the selection.
Change the blending mode of this layer to darken.
With a soft eraser brush remove any excess parts of the selection.
Repaint any hair that was covered up by the blend.

Hope this was helpful.

Lucie,

Thank you very much for that very useful tip, I  for one didn't know about that one.  Recently I needed to use a graffiti font for a specific "one time use only" type of job.  This tip of your would have have certainly saved me some time. 

Attached Link: Blender 2.5 Custom UI

Attached Link: Valeas Hair Tutorial

Select the ring of polys to extrude.
Extrude using the "E" key then choose "Region".
Enter the value "0" and then hit the enter key.
Use the Alt+S keys to move the extruded faces away from the mesh center along the face normal by either moving the mouse or entering a numerical value.  This function is called Shrink/Fatten.

You may need to select all the faces now using the "A" key twice.  First time to deselect the first group of faces then the second time to select all the faces.  Using the Ctrl+N button to flip all the face normals outside.

For your second question you need to adjust the threshold limit for the remove doubles function.  You will find this on the "Mesh Tools" tab located on your Buttons Window (F9).  Look for the "Remove Doubles" button in the top block of buttons.  Beside the "Remove Doubles" button is the "Limit" or threshold setting for the function.  This works on the selected vertices.  So if you have used the "A" key to select all the verts of your mesh then they are all included in the calculation.  So if you want to confine the "Remove Doubles"  to just a small part of your mesh then select only those verts that are needed.

DramaKing,  you may be right.  I'm a bit like you in that I don't understand 100% the how and why of this method I'm just glad that it works.

This post on BlenderArtists pointed me in the right direction.

Distributed Rendering over a local network

Sent you a PM  with a link. Hope it helps.

The question is just one out of curiosity, and the object in the render is just a random 3D doodle so to speak.  Lightening the shadow a small amount can reveal other objects that would otherwise be hidden in the shadow of the larger object.  You may be right in that the shadows are behaving the way that they should but it didn't appear to me that way.  The cube object is not hollow.  Where the "windows" are it is a simple inward extrude with intact faces so the object is still solid. In a physical sense there is no real way that the interior faces of the "windows" have either light shining on them or an object that can cast a shadow on them as they are a self contained box.