heyas; i believe ken means that the neon tubes are behind an opaque sign-front, and cause the glow to splash out from behind it on the edges. correct me if i'm wrong. anyway, as for HOW to make things glow....! you can try making additive/fuzzy additive materials. this is actually the worst way. if you duplicate your neon shape and size it up, puff it up... and stack a couple fuzzy-additive materialed copies of it over your lights, that might achieve the effect you want. but additive materials really depend on what is in the scene behind them. you can use the diffuse/ambient sliders of the material (in the last tab) to raise the light that appears on the object, increasing it to more than falls in the scene, and making the object glow. you can even set the percentages to higher than 100% by typing in numbers in those boxes. for a light-casting object, try turning the diffuse off and the ambient to several hundred. this makes self-illuminating objects, but does not cast the glow into the scene. do note however, that the ambient percentage control is affected by how much ambient light is in your scene (under the sun controls). if you turn off the ambient light in your scene, even 999% of that ambient light is going to make your glowing object still be dark. after you up the diffuse/ambient percentages, you can then place spot/point lights in your scene to light up the glowing item, and the stuff around it. you can also study daffy's sun flare object/material. it's a glow painted on a square, with a transmap and high ambient/diffuse material. you slap this over wherever you want the flare to appear in your scene, more or less parallel to the picture plane. :)