Image planes and volumetic fog problem

[vasonic]

hello all! first im new to the maya world so bare with me,
Ill be turning 1 in April;

well Im sure this is just one of those stupid simple questions that invovle a check box getting checked or something but simply because i dont see it, here goes...

I have a scene with 1 spot light "with fog on" and 1 nurbs plane, I have this plane and light inside an inverted polycube. "im using the cube as a simple room, just in case anyone's worndering why"

its a test scene; Im trying to get the image plane I created that has a transparency shape of a......ah..Star on it..."its actually a stair case but for simpicty sakes"
to produce a shadow inside the volumetric fog spotlight.

now i can get the shadow of the "star" to apear on the ground thats not a problem, i know i need to use raytrace in order to get the shadow. but when i use raytrace i lose the shadow that is produced inside the fog. when i activate depths maps i get the shadows in the fog but oviously i lose the "star shape" instread I get the imiage plane shadow shape...

now is there any plugin, special filter, mel script, anything that can do to get this to work?

to see what im talking about goto:
www.planetquake.com/stalingradmod/star.jpg

Rember there is no starcase only Star, once you have realized this you find that it is you, not the staris that bend =)

oh if you like to check out my Quake3 mod site, back space the star.jpg and press enter, if you have any commets please post away

[thedunadan]

I think u can solve your problem like this: Create two lights... one for the fogshadows and another light for the other shadows and illumination of the scene. There is one relation ship editor called "light linking" ... this one will allow u to make your light only affect those objects u want ==> break all light connections for the foglight.
I noticed that fog-lights take ages to render really, therefore i personally prefer rendering them sperately anyhow and do some compositioning afterwards. With some blur u can avoid needing a very high sampling rate for the foglights.

[vasonic]

hey that might work, thank you!