streaky volumetric spot light
 

Hi everyone. I wonder if anyone is a maya genius and can help me. Basically I've been doing a lot of work with fogged spot lights, but for some reason recently every foggy spotlight I create has big black streaks, they seem to appear where the light's wireform frame is. its a volumetric fog that uses depth map shadows, rendered with mental ray. can neone help me?

add a plane towards the end of your spotlight's casting and render it... it looks like there's an object blocking your light, and seeing a render of the light casting onto the plane would determine if this is so... otherwise it could just be a setting somewhere that got changed a while back and every time you create a spotlight it'll create it with those settings

I don't think there's an object there. its the only object in the scene. Do you have any idea what kind of setting it might be. The streak only appears when i add the depth map shadows. I can't switch to raytrace, which doesn't produce the streack, i need depth map.

well post a screen cap of your settings and i can take a look... if raytrace doesn't produce the streak then i'd say it's in your depth map shadow settings, but it doesn't have to be...