Great for downlights (where you need to light an area evenly), excellent
directional lights, backlighting (turn shadows off), search lights (where
the beam starts wide, not from a point), lasers, energy "beams" (use with
media).  One of my favourites is lighting up a glass cylinder from below (so
it's constrained to the cylinder) and then difference spheres out of the
cylinder to make it look like bubbles (they light up in it).  A luxo :-)
Once again, a lot of desklights have cylinder beams rather than spotlight
beams because the light reflects so much around the inside that it has an
even downspread rather than starting from a point.  It's often good to use
cylinder lights for getting a secular highlight on the side of an object to
emphasise the edge.

Check out
http://www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/parallax/359/max_steel_zephyr.jpg for
an example where I used a lot of cylinder lights (especially the back blue
area which was created solely by a cylinder light).  The upper sphere (which
is surprisingly only seen in the bottom of the image) was also lit by a
cylinder light to light the sphere evenly along one side (that sphere is
BIG).

--
Lance.


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For the latest 3D Studio MAX plug-ins, images and much more, go to:
The Zone - http://come.to/the.zone

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