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I am trying to create a freight train headlight. We want there to be some "atmosphere" in the beam. So, I've been working with the env fog node and an area light with high directionality. The env fog effect is confined to a poly cone.
Issue 1: I got a nice cut-off of the beam, but unfortunately I also see blackness filling the cone where the light is not illuminating (beyond the length of the fall-off, at the wide end of the cone). I hope this makes sense. I figure a workaround is to just render the light beam itself, against the blackness of Maya, and composite it in as an RGB layer only (using an additive or screen mode).
Issue 2: I want to get a little detail in the fog, the kind you might see in an especially foggy night, with actual cloud-like details illuminated by the beam. But, when I plug in a volume noise or a fractal noise node into the fog (either through density or transparency), I lose the nice cut-off / fade-out of the beam, and the entire cone is filled with the volume noise.
Aside from rendering two layers and masking the latter by the former layer (volume noise fill layer matted out by the cleaner beam layer), is there a way to get this in one easy pass?
Hope this makes sense. Thanks.
I am trying to create a freight train headlight. We want there to be some "atmosphere" in the beam. So, I've been working with the env fog node and an area light with high directionality. The env fog effect is confined to a poly cone.
Issue 1: I got a nice cut-off of the beam, but unfortunately I also see blackness filling the cone where the light is not illuminating (beyond the length of the fall-off, at the wide end of the cone). I hope this makes sense. I figure a workaround is to just render the light beam itself, against the blackness of Maya, and composite it in as an RGB layer only (using an additive or screen mode).
Issue 2: I want to get a little detail in the fog, the kind you might see in an especially foggy night, with actual cloud-like details illuminated by the beam. But, when I plug in a volume noise or a fractal noise node into the fog (either through density or transparency), I lose the nice cut-off / fade-out of the beam, and the entire cone is filled with the volume noise.
Aside from rendering two layers and masking the latter by the former layer (volume noise fill layer matted out by the cleaner beam layer), is there a way to get this in one easy pass?
Hope this makes sense. Thanks.
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