Just a quick experiment I was playing with tonight. I've been experimenting with making more assets in 2D and bringing them into my 3D environment. For this image I created an animated noise pattern in After Effects that I manipulated to look like light rays, then mapped that to a plane that I wrapped in and around some simple geometry.
My main thinking for this is that sometimes a non-photoreal result is better look than what's physically accurate. Simulating light illuminating a fog volume which is the way to do real volumetric light is way more computationally expensive and a lot harder to control. This is really fast to render, and looks pretty cool even though it doesn't look realistic.
That's about it for tonight, thanks for looking peeps! :)