I was a little disappointed at the lightning resources in poser in trying to get a glow affect. I know this has been touch on many times. I know now about the gather node somewhat and what in can accomplish. However, I don't know if it can achieve this effect (see pic). I made this pic in Animation:Master 2002. Is it possible to get this glow arround a light source?

no link seen. they have described various ways to imitate the volumetric light fx in this forum. the gather node will imitate the effect of a posersurface being illuminated by another posersurface, but the gather node will not do the volumetric effect, nor will enabling the GI variables, which will actually cause the posersurface to act as a light source.

You'll notice the "illumination" around the blade, not just on the surface of the figure. I know in Poser, light can only be gathered on a surface using the gather node. Here you can see the glow on/ in an area where there is no surface.. I hope that made sense. If it its possible please post a screenshot of your material room setup or explain what to connect to what.  :)

Yes, I suppose thats what I am trying to achieve volumetric lighting.

How about adding a glow transmap to the object? This is a flat plane parented to a cylinder object using a transmap!

That is awesome!

Could you post some screenshots?

porthos may be referring to placing the poser one-sided square just behind the cylinder (about 4X as wide as cyl.), then blurring a transmap so that it fades out at about the same distance the gather node fx fades out on the square. said transmap would just be a square with white area in centre blurring to black on right/left, or might also be done with shader tree math nodes.

This is a transmap for a one sided square, similar to porthos solution. Position, size and parent. This is fine for 2D images with simple shapes. If you are making 3D images or using complex shapes see my next post.

To get a 3D glow you will need to create a new prop from your glowing material using the grouping tool, parent it to your original then apply this texture or something similar. Be sure to turn on use displacement maps in the render settings. This render used 3 red point lights with large blur radius and an IBL.

To get the prop to glow white through the transparency I added this math node.

interesting work on those, gd. in the cane image, it appears the displacement is .0096*2, where the math node (subtract) has a value of 2 - 0 = 2.

Sorry for the confusion, I use poser native units as my default display units, The .0096 is default 1" in poser 6.
You are welcome to use any node you wish as long as the end result is around 2" or as far away as required or desired, I think the subtract node is the most usefull math function so I tend to use it instead of add, multiply, divide or any other fixed value node.
There are many other ways of getting similar results, but this is the simplest and most effective way I could think of.
Thank you GBREAL for another good question.

yes, I agree - it's a very useful technique, easy to apply. one other thing they've suggested is to surround the lightsabre cylinder with several concentric cylinders to mimic the volumetric lite fx, but I feel this displacement method is more generally applicable. of course, in poser pro ($449) we may well have the GI variables fully implemented to interact with the atmosphere, but currently (poser 7) they don't produce any volumetric fx when activated via python script.

I am such a newbie lol!

Thanks for all your help!