Volume Light Rendering

So I took a slight detour from my rendering plans. I dived into volume lights instead of writing that Blinn shader. I initially thought that it would be easy, but it really was not. I had a lot to understand about how the different shaders work together to make this work. In most other 3d programs my experience is that the volume light is a function of the light. However in 3delight this is not the case. It's a bit more cumbersome but I can sort of see why you would want to do it this way for one important reason, it's a volume in space and you can limit it much better and have more control over it, if it's separate. But the work flow to make it works like this:

1. Make  a scene with a back wall and put something in front of it.
2. Make a light that cast a deep shadow.
3. Make another object, give it some geo properties so it is transparent, assign and interior smoke shader to it.
4. Make sure the volume object is bigger than your back wall.
5. Turn on all the check boxes in the shadow map section in renderglobals

So yeah a convoluted, but worth it. No I just have to see about making it render faster because I'm sure my settings are not good. Time to look in to that step size parameter.