Thanks for all the great comments. Here's my try at a glow in the dark render for Mike K4ICY. I'm not entirely happy with it, but can't seem to get it to look much better. Any suggestions? I don't know enough about vacuum tube anatomy so I just make a glowy coil (cathode heater?) for each one and punched some holes in the cylinder I had inside the tubes so the light could come out. hehe.

Oooh, the glow...

Thanks Sun! Art-wise, It looks good to me. :-)

There are so many examples on the the net, some are more yellow, and some glow a nice deep orange with a hint of violet mixed in.




A technique I use in rendering is to make a duplicate of the "emitter" material object, one is made visible and the other is made invisible.
The visible one has just enough illumination to look pleasing.
The invisible object still gives of light but is set with a brighter output.

Also, you could increase the gamma and brightness settings to yield more visibility inside the enclosure.


I did this with my lighting fixtures here with good results: The surface of the bulbs are just light enough for detail to show up. There is even more light shining on the adjacent surfaces. Though, this is not physically correct, the result looks appealing.

Yeah, I found lots of pics of glowing tubes, but I couldn't quite deduce the geometries involved. Thanks for the tips on rendering. I'll look into how to do that duplicate object trick next time. I assume there's some way to do that in modo.