He looks like a Borg.     

     Ah yes, machine woes - having just gotten Phoenix back online, now my number two workstation Galadriel has a destroyed RAID.  Galadriel is a 2008 model, but well worth fixing.  She has 24GB of 1600MHz RAM and a liquid-cooled HyperThreaded hex-core processor factory clocked at 3.46GHz, which automatically ramps up to 3.72 GHz when only some of the cores are running (speeds up when the render gets down to the last few buckets).  At night, she glows violet. :)

     Each test was taking 45min-1hr, but that is mostly attributable to the entirety of the scene (not the neon prop), and because the scene is completely IDL, with no Poser lights.  In any case, you can use lesser render settings.

     If you used a single tubing mesh, you run into that same old problem:  If the ambient is high enough to cast a significant amount of light, the color is burned out (unless it's highly saturated), and the shape of the tubing is lost - it looks like a flat silhouette.

     Hence, one tubing mesh for the "neon", which is intended to show in the render.  This object will have a gentle ambient, so as to retain its color and shape/depth.  A second tubing mesh will be the high-ambient emitter.  In P8, it needs to be nested inside of the visible neon mesh like a matryoshka doll.  This is a severe limitation on the amount of emitter surface area for some models, and you are limited in using transparency, refraction, etc. for the neon.  Plus, in order to let IDL light through in P8, the neon must be not visible in raytracing.  For P9+ I prefer to overlay the emitter outside of the neon mesh, with the emitter's properties set to be not visible in camera, but visible in raytracing and checked as a light emitter.  The glow aura is a third tubing mesh, of considerably larger diameter.

     "I wonder if a possible the solution might be to place a flattened version of the emitter behind the IDL emitter."  That would conceal the emitter, but it would also block light from the emitter in that direction, and placement would depend on the camera perspective.  So it would work for me, and for you, but it would be beyond most casual Poser users.  Eventually, I would like to have a solution which allows for casual Poser users.

     I hate postworking, but a simple workaround for P8 on up is to render once with the neon set for visible in raytracing, then render again with the neon set to not visible in raytracing, and overlay the two in your photo manipulation program, and erase the area showing the emitter in reflection.

Poser 12, in feet.  

OSes:  Win7Prox64, Win7Ultx64

Silo Pro 2.5.6 64bit, Vue Infinite 2014.7, Genetica 4.0 Studio, UV Mapper Pro, UV Layout Pro, PhotoImpact X3, GIF Animator 5