In addition to the uberlight, the other nonstandard shader used in theses examples is smoke.sl from App. Note #20. NOTE: I didn't try to completely reconstruct the objects, camera, or light palcement. Also, I was lazy and used ambient light instead of using any fill lights. But hopefuly, everything is close enough to get the point through.
Another point of interest, the RIBs were made using Houdini. Notice how nice the RIB look and all of the friendly comments.
fig1 RIB Cylinder and cube on the floor, torus in midair.
fig2 RIB Same as Fig. 1, with a conical key light.
fig3 RIB Selection Same as Fig. 2, but the torus is unaffected by the key light.
fig5 RIB Rouned rectangle shage.
fig6 RIB A sheard barn door light.
fig6b RIB Same as Fig. 6, but with the shear turned off.
fig7 RIB Same as Fig.5, but with soft edges.
fig9 RIB Same as Fig. 2, but with a sharp cutoff.
fig10 RIB Same as Fig. 2, but with a gradual cuton.
fig11 RIB Basic shadows. Same as Fig. 2, but with shadows from the key light. For prman shad.rib was used to generate the shadow-map.
fig12 RIB Shadow selection. Same as Fig. 11, but the cube casts no shadow. For prman shad.rib was used to generate the shadow-map.
fig17 RIB Projecting a matte image as a "cookie cutter" to get alternate light shades. This RIB uses 
for a texture-map
fig17b RIB Same as Fig. 17, but the width and height are set to 0.5 instead of 1.0.
fig18 RIB Instead of using simulating shadows, using a projected matte image of tiny stars, 
fig18b RIB Same as Fig. 18, but with the atmosphere shader turned on.
fig20 RIB Projecting a color image to get a slide effect. The image used in this case is: 
fig21 RIB Intensity distribution across beam
fig22 RIB Intensity falloff with distance.