well... Ya could use a fullbright deformed sphere or something I guess. but for the most part you'd be better off drawing your special effects by hand in a paint program, or using another 3d program to make a particle effect then compositing it all together in something like after effects or Aura. For my current project I plan on taking animation done in poser and importing it as an animated background into Truespace 4. (which you can get really cheap now) then adding particle animations (using the PP FX plugin)and lens flare effects (which can be much more versitile than just the cheesy B5 cliche)over the top of the poser animation. This type of compositing without using an expensive compositing application is also very easy to do. Hmmm... come to think of it I could also change the pixel aspect ratio that way... (because you can do that in TS but not poser.)