I need help with a project I'm working on for my sightings series. There's an effect that I'm trying to pull off that I can't seem to get vue to do correctly. What I am trying to do is make low altitude clouds with a spotlight shining through it. The light is just barely visible above and below the cloud but causes a bright circular glow on the cloud itself as it is cutting through it. I'm using Vue 5 Infinite and I'm sure the effect can be done with volumetrics (I don't want to fake it). Can someone help me out? Thanks, Flashfire

Okay... I thought of a better way to explain the effect. If I can do this I can do the other. Invisible laser beam that you can see when it's shined into smoke. How to?

Haven't tried that yet, but the manual has a tutorial about it, page 413.

Just found that. It's demonstrating "faking" volumetrics using a cylinder. It just wouldn't be as realistic as I want doing that. There's got to be a way using volumetric clouds and a spotlight... there has to be! :D Thanks for the help.

Ok, I understand it better now. And I think the manual won't help here. Are you going to model the cloud yourself? If yes, why don't you apply a post processed glow effect to it, in the material editor? I know this is faking it again, but it just might look good.

Okay sounds like it might be a good idea but I have never used glow effects before. The cloud I can do with a metablob or a squished sphere and apply a volumetric cloud texture to it. V5INF has a glow option for materials. Maybe I can play around with those a bit. It's worth a shot.

You don't need your cloud to be volumetric, unless you really want it, just use fuzziness in the transparency tab. Check the cloud tutorial in the manual.( Now just how much do I love manuals, hun?!!!)