Is there a better way to do volumetric lights in blender? I know about the light halo setting, but that seems to make the light cone too noticeable and the halo part doesn’t fade with distance.
Is it possible to have a real soft halo that fade with the attenuation of the light source? Something like the image below (not exactly what I want, but I had to do it in photoshop)
In 2.55 you can just use the new volumetric material options to make light cones, shafts, halos, ect… from any type of lamp (outside of hemi since it doesn’t do shadows) visible.
You’ll need to be careful with the density and the power of the lamp though, if the material is too dense you may not be able to see all the way through the scene.
You can also do this using another method in 2.49 using a blend procedural texture set to halo (and set to UV coordinates) and, use it as the texture for thousands of billboards (this method fakes volumetric rendering, but can be very effective)
we did this in NRK volume thread a few months back
you can find some sample file also there!
salutations
It seems like a lot of work just to get a simple soft faded spotlight. I have an old copy of cinema 4d v6 and it does this wonderfully (with noisy ‘fog’ like effects and everything). Is this a limitation of blender’s lights? Or is it designed to be that way?
The method I outlined in 2.49 that requires a bit of setup work is needed because the only versions of Blender with a true volumetric system is the 2.5 beta series. The 2.49 spot halo feature is actually a very old scanline-based feature that was in Blender since it was open-sourced, it simply simulates a cone volume and its nature prevents it from being visible in anything raytraced.
The 2.5 beta volumetric system can be used to make scattering volumes that can allow all light sources with shadow capability to create light shafts, and on top of that the procedural textures can also be used to affect the density of the scattering material and create the ‘noisy fog-like effects’ and such.