I think we'll need to distinguish between two effects:

[_] that soft-edged aura enveloping the object

[_] object casting light onto its surroundings

The enveloping aura could be done in P5, maybe P4 Pro Pack, using two daisy-chained Edge_Blend nodes to control transparency of the aura. You have to be able to make an enveloping mesh, either by duplicating the object and scaling up a bit, or using a modeler to "shell" the object mesh. This effect is pretty quick to render. The examples you cited (orb, lightsabre blade) are strictly convex shapes, which allows for just duplicating the object and scaling up.

Casting light onto the surrounding environment could (sort of) be done by applying the Gather node to all of the receiving environment objects. That made each item "see" the ambient light from the glowing object. It was terribly slow to render, and the result was crude (grainy).

P8/Pro2010 allowed lightcasting in limited circumstances. With P9/Pro2012+ you could use an unseen emitter clone and get good adjustable strength lightcasting. As of P11, Superfly does lightcasting from the glow object itself (no emitter clone prop needed) very well.

I don't know of a way to do this without dipping a toe into the advanced material room.

Is there a particular item you have in mind? I have a P9/Pro2012+ lightsabre amongst my freestuff. If you want to be able to do this with any arbitrary object, you'll need to learn some new skills, no way around it.

Poser 12, in feet.  

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