using lights

[rakennedy75]

I am just starting on Lightwave and I have been experimenting with lights. For the most part I have learned how to use them along with the ray trace features in the Rendering. My question is:

Can I make the lights work without the need of a surface. What I mean is if there is no surface around how do you make the light visible. Kind of like if you were using a flash-light. You would see where the light is coming from and how far it reaches in space.

Another example would be to have text and have beams of light shooting through the text, or around the edges assuming the cone angle is larger than the size of the text or object.

Maybe I am thinking about this wrong, or is there another way to achieve this type of effect.

hope the explanation is clear enough.

Thanks for taking the time.

[mufty]

If you mean that you want to see the light-beams, then you need to enable the Volumetric Lighting option, which is about half way down the light properties panel.

[John Fornasar]

Another example would be to have text and have beams of light shooting through the text,

The old method still works, and is most likely a bit faster...

copy the outline of your text into another layer, extrude it, and give it a semi-transparent surface with a fractal texture stretched in the "z". There may be some tutorials out there using this method.

[toby]

Also see the Lens Flare option in the lights' properties panel, in order to actually see the lights' source.

[rakennedy75]

I actually fell upon volumetrics by accident after experimenting for a while.
This gives me some more options to play around with.

Thanks for the help and the time.