Volumetric light overlap question

[Eric Camden]

I've noticed that when two volumetric klieg cones overlap, it produces a harsh dark gray field. Is there any way to overcome this? I was looking for something that would turn off the additive property, but there isn't one for volumetrics.

[agep]

Did you render it with multipass?

[Eric Camden]

Yes, I did use multi pass. Once at 9x and once at 25x with no improvement. I did some screen caps to show what I mean. You can see the front, side, and camera view setup, and three renders. The first small black one is with a short falloff, the way I need it for the shot, the second one is with a much longer falloff, and the third is with contrast reduced from 50% to 25%. Both the klieg and the bulb have volumetrics turned on to default settings and nothing else is rendering, such as shadows or reflections, etc. Is there a way to have these two volumetric lights stay in their respective positions and still render with a nice "normal" volumetric blend?

[robcat2075]

presuming that just one light by itself renders correctly, then do a pass for each light and composite the two passes.

 

If you have after Effects i think the "lighten" composite mode would preserve the brightness better than a 50% blend. Lighten uses whatever is brightest from two sources.