Hi all, I'm currently working on a moonlit scene in Poser 11.3 Pro with Bazze's muscle car in the scene facing forward, and I'd like to know how I can create realistic beams of light emanating from the headlights. Thanks for your input in advance!

Anim8dtoon

Position and parent spotlights to the vehicle's headlamps. You'll need to enable Atmosphere for 'em to show up, though.

Stick around; others will give you more detailed instructions... my answer is the basics of it.

If you want the beams to be visible through the air, you're gonna need volumetric atmosphere - I know you have my light set, look for AO_Volumetric Atmosphere in the props library! In the materials you can find options to make it thinner or thicker (that means "less dusty air" or "more dusty air"). It's a large cube, you might need to make it larger to cover your entire scene as it was originally built to render around characters :)

Having that, you can set up spotlights starting at the headlights and pointing forward from the car!

Which render engine are you using? I think there are a few ways to do it in each, but may not work so well in the other.

RedPhantom posted at 1:45PM Sun, 20 June 2021 - #4421702

Which render engine are you using? I think there are a few ways to do it in each, but may not work so well in the other.
Red, I'm using Poser 11 Pro Superfly......

Transparent PNG layer... if you decide to add the headlight beams in postwork... resize, rotate, change color temperature, etc. I used a cone with a gradient transparency map once to create something similar in Poser.

...and facing forward... Yikes! I'm going to need some welding goggles

Here's what I did. The scene contains 2 spotlights set just before the headlights, the car, the envriosphere to add a hint of other light, a ballcone to have something in the light, and a plain box encompassing the front of the car and off the screen to act ad fog fore the light to reflect off of. The headlights had a basic poser root node only texture so I added a little ambient color and value of 1 so they'd show up. The box I added a cycles root node and a scatter node. I reduced the end angle of the spot lights to forty to narrow the beam some. That's something you'll have to adjust along with bightness.

Here's the scene setup

here's the material for the box

and here's the final low quality render

Like in life with laser beams or light rays, you can't see them unless there are particles in the air. You have to put something in front of the lights to simulate the particles. In this case, the box with the scatter volume. The atmosphere doesn't work well with superfly and slows the render more than this setup will.