Come learn the art of 3D computer generated art and animation. This blog deals with the lessons learned and the art created by Robert G. Male using DazStudio from Daz3D.
Also covered are the ancillary software, tools, techniques, and processes needed both before and after rending in the 3D software.
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Previously we looked at UberArea lights from Omnifreaker. We mentioned how for added realism you could add volumetric effects. Today I'll show you how. This time in your "Content Library" you need to find "Shader Presets" then "omnifreaker" then "UberVolume" to get to the shaders required.
You will want to work with a primitive almost exclusively with this, though I can see some uses otherwise. There is a preset cone and a preset sphere provided along with the shaders. They even come directly parentable to a light--just select the light in your scene and then load that option. I did not find the cone very useful. It's too limited and felt like it grabbed too much light. Whatever you use, the process is the same. You select your primitive (if it isn't preset already) and you go to the Surface tab and select the primitive's surface. Once you have done that load in one of the shaders. You can switch between them later if you like. For my example image below I used the !UberVolume Base, because it picks up the least additional light since it has less substance.
For reference the added light stream items will pick up light from any lights in the scene that come near them, not just the lights you want them to appear to emanate from. They also can develop errors when interacting with the materials of items behind them. I had some of these errors, but I dealt with them by running a render without the building and then overlaying that on a render without the volume cubes that I used. That way you can also add some transparency to that overlay if you want.
You can see the effect that I've created is not quite perfect, for two reasons. The first is I visually lined up my light streams with the bright spots on the floor. They didn't correspond to the size of the opening creating the light because the distance makes the bright patches larger. That distance and the angle of my lights also made the farthest end wider than the closest end of the light pool. I did not account for this in the light stream either. Without looking too closely I cannot say how easy it is to spot these flaws--this is just to show how it works anyway.
Here are some simple examples of what the effects look like.
