lighting question
 

ok soo i'm making a laser light and im using a spotlight.. and ive bumped the cone angle down really low soo the beam looks like a laser but you only see the light when it hits the wall is there a way to be able to the laser as its in the air before it hits the wall?

Try using glowing semi transparent geometry instead of a spotlight.

Dave

soo like make a cylinder make it transparent and make it glow? im not sure i know how to make it glow..

i actually got the light fog option to work.. but it looks funky soo imma try wat u suggested and see which looks better

Use a surface shader or a mia_material_x, under advanced tab for additional color connect a mia_light_surface node and adjust parameters to get the effect you want (you need final gather enabled and some surrounding geometry for the light to bounce off to get this to work).

I made this in about 30 seconds. It's just a cylinder with Incandescence and glow intensity. When you select a color in the incandescence, bump up the brightness (V value) higher than 1. You can also bump up the saturation (S value) higher than 1 as well. Just keep playing with those two values and the glow setting until you get the desired look. If you composite the laser onto an image like I did, the glow will be MUCH MUCH less. In otherwords, you'll probably want to exagerate the glow effect in maya render to make it look correct in compositing. Hope this helps.

That looks rather nice Perfecto.

@ Gtovy

Since Maya glow can be a bit hit or miss, you can render out whatever objects that need to glow to a separate render layer and then apply glow in comp.

i think this is the best solution. We just finished a commercial basically making laser beam things that fly down roads, over water, etc, and all the glow was done in comp.

thank you all thanks soo much i got it too look really good thank you!!! :):):)

just one more question in regards to Miss_Nova-- (Use a surface shader or a mia_material_x, under advanced tab for additional color connect a mia_light_surface node and adjust parameters to get the effect you want (you need final gather enabled and some surrounding geometry for the light to bounce off to get this to work).

i got the material mia_material_x and found the tab and additional color attribute but where is the mia_light_surface?

It's under the mental ray textures in Hypershade, mmd and drop it over the material. Again make sure that fg is turned on in render settings and also adjust the fg contribution on the node itself.

Keep in mind that this is light emitting geo and not glow though so try out all these things and see which works best with what you're doing. As gen said it's hit and miss with glow in maya and you only get one node for shader glow so you have no real control.