Creating a light beam

Question

I need a light beam, something like this: https://cloud.blender.org/p/caminandes-3/56c6da5cc379cf0079716873 I tried it, but the emmision shader dosen't work that way now - when I make make a simple emmision material and aply it to a cube, what I get is this: . How could I do something like that with blender 2,77? I need a light beam for a lighthouse, it should rotate and when facing the camera, the core should be much lighter than the rest. I tried adding a sphere with an emmision shader in a cone with an emmision:transparency 1:20 material and adding boolean intersection modifier, so that as the cone rotates, the sphere disapears, but it's visible through side of the cone.

Answer 1

The answer on your question is rather simple. What you missed in the tutorial, is that the Emission shader node is connected to Volume in Material Output node, which is correct way in this example. Yours node setup is wrong, cause Emission shader is connected to Surface in Material Output node.Fix this mistake, and everything will start to make sense in the tutorial.

Answer 2

You can do this by using the volumetric nodes.

1. Add a light source. I'm using a spotlight. (A material with an emmision shader works also fine)
2. Add a cube that is surrounding the rest of the scene.
3. Open the Node editor
4. Give the cube a volumetric scatter and a volumetric absorbtion shader combined with the mix shader (attach it to the volume output), like this:
5. Place a camera and tweak with the values and you get something like this:

I hope this helps!