[Brian Jones]

The light should be set to Volumetric (Visible Light) and you have to set the pyrocluster material(s) to Cast Shadows in the Shadow tab of the material.

[Brian Jones]

AO could be a problem scene wide since the door is recessed the whole thing would be darker. Try turning the AO off and see what you get

[Brian Jones]

[Bryan Richards] “sat under the glow object”
under or behind? – if behind does the glow object have a composite tag to not cast shadows

what are the GI settings and does the scene have any AO (either in materials or the whole scene)?

[Brian Jones]

I tried the Pyramid, editable, Edges Mode and bevel, toss that in a HyperNurb and it’s close – done right it has nice smooth corners but because of the HNurb/cage interaction it’s not quite perfect as a pyramid you could play with weighting but that’s tricky to not get hard edges where you don’t want them so I went with the cube.

[Brian Jones]

is the Wind Shape big enough to include the grass (or just set it to Unlimited)? For more realism try adding a Turbulence too (also Unlimited).

[Brian Jones]

Your Solver object is set to stop calculating at Frame 50 so it stops there. Either extend your timeline out (more frames) and set the Solver to calculate until the end of the timeline (if the timeline is 360 frames let the solver calculate 360 frames). Or you could set the Gravity a lot higher (5 – 10) so the fall happens quicker.
Either way change the Collision on the Cube from Full to Box and on the Sphere from Full to Ellipsoid, it will all calculate much quicker.

[Brian Jones]

Cube – fillet it – make it editable – rotate the cube in H 45° – select the top poly – grow selection until the top edge fillets around the cube are also selected – delete – select one of the corner fillets and the leftover ‘corner’ fillet bits on top of that – move the axis all the way down (Selected/World) – rotate into the center 45° (or -45° depending) – do that for all the corners – join the bits at the top. You get this. There could be a better way but that’s all I could think of.

[Brian Jones]

range mapper would go into VL Outer Distance or maybe Falloff – whichever works for you. Just make sure the output lower and output upper are sensible values

[Brian Jones]

extrudes will do holes like Illustrator (one spline inside another) but only if the ‘hole’ is in the same spline object. So take the ‘JB’ (in the right position) and the light green oval, select them both and do a Functions/Connect which will give you another spline with both of the splines in it. You can hide or toss the original splines. Extrude the new one.
It would probably be easiest to do more or less the same for the outside object too, that way they’d fit together perfectly. An example

[Brian Jones]

there’s a tutorial here at the Cow by Mylenium https://library.creativecow.net/articles/mylenium/Mograph_beautiful_noise.php

There was also a Sound Effector tutorial in the Classic Tutorials on the v10 disk (don’t know if it’s on the v11 disks)