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Is it possible to control the cone angle of a projector. I'm shining a projector through a volumetric onto someone's face but I have to put the projector very close to the face and the beams are radiating out in a 90° cone. I'd like to pull the projector away and get the beams more parallel, not as fanned out. Tried the spotlight trick of putting the projector inside a tube to focus it but, as I suspected, it wasn't the answer.

So that'll be a no, then!

You can use the map to control the cone....black area of the map emits no light,... map is spherically projected.

Yes, it should work. You can get a very narrow beam if you want. Try turning off tiling in the map parameters if you don't get expected results.

Spherical mapping? That makes sense now. Because we are required to use a simple plain, I'd assumed it was simply flat mapped to that and I was using a square image. If it's spherically mapped I assume that the left and right 25% of it are dead zones as they will be wrapped around the back of the plane so not emitting, is that right? It's a shame in that I'll need a huge map to get decent resolution in the focus area but there you go. I shall carry on my tests. Thanks for the tips.

EDIT: Actually not too bad. I reduced the scale of the image area to about half the depth of the image file and it narrows the beam considerably.

I think its like ies, you use a sphere, or a piece of a sphere, and Mihai reminds us, by disabling tiling but still using repeats, you can use a small map.