LASER Rendering

[Snogen]

Hi.
Is there someone who has experience and can share some ideas on how to render LASER light beams, similar to the below?
I've tried many options, but have failed miserably. 

[mattjgerard]

I usually do mine in photoshop, but I'm not going for a realistic look, mainly just indication where infrared detector beams are located.  I'm will be following this to see what others come up with. I've tried glass, cloudy plastics, etc as well with varied success. Dries suggested using a large noise in the  bump and playing with that to show some "flow" in the beam, but not sure that will get you where you are looking for. I thnk you will be looking more for gradient mapping along the short axis of the beams to vary the intensity and saturation of the color. The other thing that will have a large impact is that lasers are usually bouncing off particles in the air, and how to portray that in the image.