Star Trek tractor beam effect

Question

I am trying to create the tractor beam effect from Star Trek. I applied an emission shader with a noise texture as the factor and set the scale on the x channel of the texture coordinate to 0. That got me close. I thought if I applied this material to a cylinder then scaled one end of it down I would be done. However I get the following effect.

Can I adjust the coordinates so the rays come together at the top? Is there a better way to get this effect? I want to use it in an animation which is why I used the noise texture. By animating the texture coordinates I can get the rotating beam effect you see in the series.

Answer 1

This is written for Cycles, however the same steps apply for Blender Internal except you do not need the volume mesh. All steps including the shadow mesh and lamps are the same.

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I would recommend using a cone shaped mesh set to volume, a mesh that has holes in it to give the beam shadow, and a spot lamp. Start by adding a cone to your scene using Shift+A > Mesh > Cone:

Now move it, scale it, etc. as desired and add a spot lamp using Shift+A > Lamp > Spot and move it to the top of the cone.

Now change the cone material to have a Transparent surface material and a Volume Scatter volume material in the material settings:

Now all you need to do is add the texture to the volume. I do this by adding a plane, subdividing, and then deleting some random vertices:

Now move it into the beam of light, rotate, duplicate, etc. and tweak the lamp settings and position as desired. You should end up with a result like this:

I have included the .Blend file for you to examine and compare with.