Hey Josh,
There are two ways that VW displays light beams. The "Draw Beam" option in the Object Info window shows a phyiscal representation of the beam of light in lines. This is just for the purpose of determining how much of the
stage will be covered by a given
unit, but you can't vary the color or
intensity. In order to make this work you have to make sure that the units are not only pointing at the
focus point but in the Object info window there is a text field that says "focus" or something like that. enter the object name of the
focus point you want to use, click draw beam and the click refresh labels.
However, what I think you're trying to do is be able to actually display, somewhat artistically, what the beam of light will look like (color and what not). To do this you need Renderworks as well as
vectorworks. It's more involved than I care to outline here but you can get some good tutorials here:
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/thetr263/VW8/VW8Tutr.html
they're for
vectorworks 8, but they still apply to the newer versions as well.
hope that cleared this up a
bit