Ok, the only slight issue is that because it is a particle it always faces the camera. That’s a good thing. However it should only face the camera horizontally. Not vertically. Not sure if the JME particle system can do that. If not I might have to write that myself. Of course, having a real volumetric solution would be even better. But I’ll check that out later
Ok, just tried with the volumetric light filter and I got this result:
So it is working in some way but that’s not the look I’m looking for 
Maybe I am putting the filter at the wrong spot though. I now have the following filters:
- Directional shadow filter
- 5 spotlight shadow filters
- TranslucentBucketFilter
- 2 VolmeLightFilters
- All the other filters for fog, bloom, dof, ssao, …
not sure about last screenshot what happended, but about “vertical rotation” you can search for “bilboard” keyword, for example “trees” also rotate only horizontally.
and btw, last screenshot with dust looks really nice, good work.
Point sprites are always oriented to the screen. They are rendered on the GPU and you have to do weird shader tricks if you want them to do otherwise (and even then it’s only faking it).
…point sprites are good if you wanted to make your light beam out of thousands of small points as I envisioned in my earlier posts.
If you only have one or two “points” then it’s probably better just to use a billboarded quad. Then you can set the billboarding however you like.
It’s going to look weird up close, though.
I’m going to fade away the billboard when I get too close. I think that will look better