I've seen some good examples of Headlights on a car animated, that had a visual stream of lights comming out. I know you can do it in Photoshop for a picture easy enough. But I need it for an animation. A car is driving through a city. and there is Streetlights. So the Car headlights need to be fairly bright.

I finally got everything working on this animation clip. It is complex, but everything I've tried with the lights don't show up as a visual stream of light. I am going to save the scene as is. then when I get the information I will place and prop each stream of light to each Headlight.

Thanks

There are a few ways to do this.

1. You can parent two spotlights to the car, in the headlight recesses. You can then use the atmosphere settings in Poser. This will cause the lights to show beams. This method is good, but for an animation it will take a long time to render.

2. A shortcut is to parent to cone primitives to the car, and apply some sort of cloudy procedural texture to them, and give it a small amount of ambient light. (The cones must be basically invisible with a small glow to them). This will render a lot faster.

There are a few other ways as well, but these two are the easiest.

Thanks for the clear Detail Solution to the Problem. I didn't want to go any further with it, as Once I set the Car up with the lights, I want to save it in my Charature files for Whenever I need to use it again.
 
I had tried the Atmosphere with the beams, and it does take a long time to render with all the other suff within the scene. I plan on putting the car with the headlights into my Characture Folder all setup to go when ever needed. Thanks again.

I would use a 3D node for the diffuse, with global coordinates turned on (so in your animation the detail on the headlights does not stay still while the car moves, but the car will "drive" through the node)

a combination of spots and cloud nodes are great for making dusty looking atmospheres.

As for why your image looks funky, that will be caused by edge transperancy.  switch to advanced mode and set transperancy edge to 0

Will Try this, Thanks

I won't be able to try this out till tomorrow. My machine is rendering all through the night

Well I Finally got what I needed.
Templargfx. One thing I did was placed the lighs where they belonged. and Parented them each to a Cube which is lined up crossways to the lights.Then I made the cube invisible.

Now I can make my lights giggle the slightest bit on smoother roads and a good bit on bumper roads, just by the slightes up and down adjustmenst. that can be Pythoned or copy and paste the keys in duplicate.

Thanks again

nice idea on the cube there.  I often use primitives as anchors. its extremely handy if you want to rotate something not around its axis. just plop a prop in the place you want to rotate the object around, parent the object to your prop, and rotate the prop!

I have my Police car set up -  
1.) for daytime driving with the charatures in the car. 

1. Bright lights looking as if you were the driver with regular spotlights.
2. night light in the car to show the driver and passengers faces at night with the light beams streaming out.

It took away a days worth of animating and rendering time. but Now I covered just about every police car senerio. Why shucks, I even figured out how to make the Police sound like hes talking throught a megaphone device in Adobe Audition.