man I have the memory of a ZX Spectrum after a nuclear test :P

anyway, years ago, the easy way to get a great effect for a render was to make an object an "area light", then hide the area light object by merely turning it to "hide from render" but it would leave the light still working.
Alas now that turns the light off, as well, doh.

Anyway, easy way to do it is to make a new layer, set that layer to invisible, then in render settings, set it to render ONLY VISIBLE LAYERS

so you get the great effect of an area light, but the object the area light is made from, is hidden! :)

ok why use area lights?

they are far far more realistic, because in real life, light NEVER comes from a single point, save for a laser/Big bang :P

I also found ages ago that duplicating an object, making it an area light, can make lots of great special effects, like magic glowing swords/potions etc
of course with radiosity any material set to have some degree of "Luminous" will literally shed light, but nto quite same as an actual light

Think I found this trick before and posted it here, but hey as said , my memory is shot to bits :P making new tutorial on shadows/light anyway ;)

my tutorial on lighting in Vue, need to update it again in "light" of this "illuination" of mine...sorry, too much Terry Pratchett: one must pun! ;)

http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/tutorials/htm/22.html

sword's blade and potion liquid duplicated made into area lights from old tutorial

 where this stuff comes in real handy is say, light from lava, a forge etc, throwing light from broad area looks way more realistic, and in general for indoor stuff it's better than a point light, but it is slower to render

Clever.  I could have used this the other day for an image I posted here.

Thanks for this, much appreciated.

Kind of a different problem, I'm trying to make a star light my Ringworld.  The ring is modeled to scale.  Also need to figure out how to get clouds on it.  But the clouds will be smaller than pixels at this rate.  :)

Love to see a render of Ringworld, Shawn. That story fascinated me.

My pleasure :)

oh if things are to scale and truly MASSIVE or extreme true ranges, they don't always work right

ie, sometimes if a Sun object or any object is too far, it simply may not work/appear.
I've noticed this problem is less encountered recently

I do space renders so have noted such issues, also with positioning planet/sobjects above/far away beyond atmosphere to get right look, such as moons or giant suns

I have noticed alas that when I make a SPHERICAL WORLD scene, models can end up "decimated" (reduced in polygon count) to pieces of ugly junk (mesh is reduced so far it's a mess) even though I never turned decimation on! :(

but that's no biggie, easy to fix, make another light object make sure it has NO lens flare, it's ot only affect the ring/planet you wish to light, move it closer to them or to centre of scene