Stained-glass window

[jugglingom]

Ok. This is my first post here. Just so you know where I'm coming from, I jumped from 3D Studio r4 straight into soft 3.9 and then right into XSI, because of my new job. Thanks to all you guys here, I've been able to keep convincing my boss that I know what I'm doing! =)

Two questions: (forgive me. first post. Pent-up frustrations and all...)
1- I'm doing the old church/stained-glass window type scene. Originally, I thought I'd used a volumic light with a texture projection for the light beams. However, It seems that spotlight texture projection wipes out the volumic effect. SO, I went to the "real" method of projecting the volumic light through a textured window, allowing it to pick up the colors by using the transparency setting.
However, this seems to really slow down the render. Back in the day, I used to fake this stuff with an extruded polygon and transparency mapping, so I'm new to this volumic lighting thing (but it looks so nice). Any one have any suggestions for making this faster and still look good? Lowering the settings speeds it up but makes it look pretty bad. Is there another way to create the scene while keeping the render down to a sensible time? The deadline is coming and I don't want to give up on the light beam look! I'd love to be able to use Final Gathering too, but can't afford the time...

2- I saw this mentioned somewhere before, but I don't know if an answer came out. I want to do pixie-dust/comet kind of particle things swirling around a trophy. Using an inverted sphere around the scene, I had problems with the primary rays showing up wherever the particles passed by, even though only secondary rays were turned on. The second thing I tried was to use Spherical Enviroment mapping, but it seems that I can only chose between raytraced reflection OR reflection map. I wanted to have the particle comets reflected in the trophy. With raytraced, I have the particles, but no reflection map. With reflection map only, I have the opposite. Any ideas? Am I missing something?

Sorry for the long post

Rob

"I don't have a cool e-mail tag-line"

[cowsmanaut]

one suggestion about your primary seconday rays.. I think that if it's a setting you have just on the light that there is always a default light in the scene which I usually delete.. it often seems to have it's own weird settings

otherwise speaking I would suggest you be sure that all of your elements are within the sphere.

For the stained glass if it's not changing angles (no camera pans or rots) and you don't have anyone(thing) going through them.. render them on a seperate pass for 1 frame and then composite that frame back into the whole with the alpha channel. or if you don't have a composit proggy you can just simply stick it on a grid and orient it towards the camera and slap the alpha on that and it will act like a layer.