volume light

[cristoforo]

Is it possible to have a volume light shine through text of a plane which is only applied as an opacity map and not actually cut out of the plane? In the past I have subtracted max text from a plane.....but when I do it now the subtraction is all messed up.....the text does not come out well. there some trick to this? Do not remember doing anything special in the past. Does anyone by chance have an arabic font?

[kimgar]

i just stumbled upon the exact same problem, can't make it work either, tried all sorts of opacity, displace etc. getting nowhere.

i'm trying to make beams of light coming from certain countries on a spinning globe, and my mind is more stuck than usual today, anyone have any wild ideas out there?

[Da_elf]

when trying to use volumetric lights from opacity maps i usually use projector maps in the lights. you would need to come up with your own way of doing it but usually i render from the point of view of the light to get the map

[kimgar]

thanks for the tip elf, render from lights point of view, hmmm, would need some 360 render then, and wrap that around the globe afterwards....hmmm
i've got a jpg mask of my countries to use as projection, the placement of mask->light->globe makes my head hurt

hoped to simply whack that opacity mask on my globe and press 'make nice render' button, but that would ofcourse have been boring

i might try to dump my jpg in flash, save as vector import as spline and see if i can somehow wrap splines around that globe, would be easier match things up then, hmmm

[kimgar]

yey, this is good enough!



vector to spline with extrude and bend