Beam

Category: mental ray > Volume

Shader Family: Volume

Output: Color

Related Softimage shader: Lume Beam

The Lume Beam shader creates quick-to-render atmospheric effects such as volumic light beams and halos from selected light sources in your scene. Rendering speed is achieved by eliminating shadow calculations, which means that when shadows are necessary, you are responsible for creating shadow-casting geometry for the beam's area of effect.

This shader prefers light sources with an origin, directional lights (such as infinite lights) do not work as well. Also, note that the Lume Beam shader ignores the attenuation properties of the light.

Name	The name of the shader node displayed in the render tree. Enter any name you like, or leave the default.
Color	Sets the color of the virtual fog particles. The final color of the beam or halo is determined by both the color of the particles and the color of the lights themselves.
Density	Adjust the "thickness" of the fog effect surrounding the light source. Larger values cause the effect to be bigger and brighter; smaller values cause the effect to be smaller and dimmer.

Lights

Creates a light list to specifiy which lights should produce the effect. For more information, see Using Light Lists [Direct Illumination].