@ghostship said in Atmosphere In Superfly: @nagra_00_ Volume nodes on a flat, single sided plane is pointless and a waste of GPU computations and my time. All those math nodes and trickery that can be accomplished with just turning off shadow casting for the water object??? Meanwhile i found some time to make some test renders with turning off shadow casting as you suggested. But first of all let me clarify my previous post. I am pretty sure there was a misunderstanding. For all the pools and ponds i have in my runtime the water plane (maybe water surface is a better wording) is part of the object. What i referred to was: To have refractive water with light passing through using FF on such an object, there was no other way than replacing the water surface by a new object and set it to cast shadows off. Hope that point is clear now. Now to the cast shadow off suggestion for SF. For my test render i choose an old jacuzzi model. Test setup is EZdome with BarcelonaRoofTop HDRI and one infinite light for the sun. Render are made with CPU and branched path tracing off. First render is using the unmodified jacuzzi and a water shader like this: Render with original water surface of object, caustics off: SuperFly: Rendering time: 318.11 seconds. Now i replaced the water surface by a cylinder object (cast shadows off) that covers the volume of the water. Please note that the surface of the original water surface is not exactly flat like the cylinder is. Thus the reflection on the water surface looks different. Water shader for the cylinder is the same as above without the LightPath math. SuperFly: Rendering time: 307.96 seconds. This was with caustics off. Lets switch them on and make a new render. SuperFly: Rendering time: 366.07 seconds. Looks better but its still to dark. Where is the light from the sun going through the water? Well its a render engine limitation on caustics calculation for the infinite sun light. BB explained it in another thread. BTW i double checked the settings for cast shadows. In my tests setting cast shadows for the cylinder to off did not help to compensate anything. To ensure the cylinder object setup was correctly i made another render. This time i used the water shader with LightPath math. My conclusion is: To get a good render within a reasonable time frame, use of LightPath information is the only way when infinite or point lights are part of a scene (area lights should work better but i never tried).

@morkonan said in How would you create a flashlight beam or a streetcorner light beam in Poser ?: @eclark1849 said in How would you create a flashlight beam or a streetcorner light beam in Poser ?: @morkonan Actually, to answer Ghostman, I do have it, but never quite finished it. I've also been feeling reeealllly under the weather lately. I have NO energy at all. So let me see if I can marshall my energy reserves and finish everything. You take your time, bro! No pressure, just a bit of fun. If you don't have fun or enjoy yourself while putting it together, then table it for a bit or forever, your choice. Or, if you'd rather, just share some tips about what you've learned, throw in a few catchwords, here and there, to point people in the right direction, right in this thread, then go relax, watch T.V., read a book or do whatever makes you feel comfortable. ;)