In Poser 4 I found a tutorial in a book that explained in a simple visual way how to create a serviceable glowing effect say in a light saber or glowing orb or glowing eyes. But it no longer works in Poser Pro 2014. IS there an easy way t accomplish this in the 2014 Pro. Please, keep in mind I am not the sharpest knife i the drawer and Advanced Materials room just does not warm my cockles...in other words I don't really know how to work in it so the tutorial has to be simple. Thanks!

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.

3 family member deaths within 8 months, depression and anxiety and all the freaking meds that followed and now at 65 my brain stopped working properly. No way I can do that. Dipping my toe is now tightly choreographed to soaking my feet in a foot bath. :( THanks

Well, I have ready-made models of lightsabre and orb, if you want them.

ok I can start there. Where can I find them?

If you are willing to pay for a product you could try this

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/i13-ambient-dreams/101993/

in the market place here.

The download link for the lightsabre is in my first post. I'm working up an orb and a light bulb. When finished, I'll zip-pack all of them and upload them to the R'osity freestuff.

Thanks so much for all the help. Look forward to getting these props especially the lowing orb! :) I asked for a Silvering MAT file someone created and tried something I never could figure out and that was copying the MAT settings from the human figure to other figures and it seemed to work with a bit of bashing. I know it probably sounds stupid but I was so excited I actually learned something I just can't tell you! So If i find other light sabre handle models I can do the same thing to get the glow effect transferred from yours to them?

My lightsabre materials might work for someone else's model; it depends on their mesh. A lot of lightsabre models use a pair of crossed transmapped planes for the blade. I use a 3D mesh blade. I could get a transmapped blade to cast some light.

I have the Superfly versions of the light bulb and lightsabre running render tests now; then I'll run Firefly test renders. Geometries are already extracted with edited PP2 files updated.

Superfly tests of a couple of orb variants:

the orbs are beautiful. So they are not only glowing but work as light emitters to light up other objects in set?

Right; the orb itself is casting light; there are no Poser lights in the scene, the orb is doing all of the illumination. And the strength of that illumination is easily adjustable.

The orb is UV mapped, so you could apply a "hologram monitor" image map in place of the fiery one. :D The blue biolumenescent material is animated; if you render an animation, the blue plasma surges and flows. :D

orb template:

is there a simple step by step tutorial to set up self illuminating props like torches or your orbs or can those setting be copied and transfered from scene to scene prop to prop for non-jointed character props of course....but simple props?

The material setups can be used on other props, though sometimes radically different UV mapping or mesh design might require changes.

Ooh, that reminds me - torch

Cool! Got it!

Firefly test of the Claymore lightsabre:

Superfly test of the light bulb:

Workstation Cameron has just started a Superfly test of the Claymore lightsabre, and I'll soon start Urania on a Firefly test of the lightbulb.

The glowy deom props pack has been uploaded to freestuff, pending approval.

Meanwhile, more test renders: