Scattering Study

I should be working on textures right now.  But I'm not!  Now that I've got a material system in place, there's just too much fun to be had elsewhere :D  For example...arbitrarily-shaped emitters!  And you know what that means...I can finally make the mining beam.  To that end, I've been doing some scattering studies tonight.

Here's a beam cutting through sinusoidal clouds of gas:

Here's the same beam with twice the luminosity:

I really love the way the multiple scattering saturates the nearby gas with color.  That's exactly the effect that I'm looking for!  I'm still wondering if this scattering is exactly correct....I'm a little concerned about the visible silhouettes of the two beams through the gas on the top layer.  Maybe that's correct, but it looks a little odd to me.

And, just for fun, here's an awesome-colored beam of the same intensity as the last one: