Searchlight in vray

[Stephen Hughes]

Hi all,

 

I'm trying to model and animate a searchlight for my scene (similar to the bat signal, or something you would see at a movie premiere) as attached. Obviously the lighting fixture isn't the problem, it's the light beam being shown to fade away as it rises into the night sky that I'm having difficulty replicating.

 

I use vray and am really struggling with creating the effect as there is no volume light effect using a vray light. I've tried modelling the light beam as geometry and giving it a vray light material with falloff but it doesn't look right.

 

And I know something similar can be done with standard lights and rendered in scanline but these don't seem to work when converted to vray.

 

If anyone has any suggestions or tutorials it would be greatly appreciated.

 

Cheers.

[Nic H]

volume light does work with vray you just often need to turn exposure off (this is with standard lights)

 

if you want to use vray lights you need to add a vrayenvironment fog and an atmospheric gizmo

to get the beams you will need to turn directional to near 1.0 in vray lights to get them acting more like a traditional spot light

 

i would always render this kind of thing separately. often i create an xref with a black override and no GI, reflections etc and that file has the environment fog and volume light in it. then you can just screen it over in post (alternatively you can use the vray atmosphere element)

 

not 'arch vis' but i used this technique here:

http://www.nichamilton.info/10659/999594/moving-image/bandshell-landfill

 

not arch vis but done using the technique above

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

What type of camera are you animating? If it is similar to the distance and angle you are showing in your reference image the I would just paint a some maps in Photoshop and assign them as a Vray light material with transparency in Max. They will render a lot faster and give you more control over the final look.

 

Alternately you could probably do them entirely in AE as well and get decent result.

 

I would only render the volume light if you are doing a camera close enough that you need an actual volume to the light so that it looks believable.