In article <3d50f8a6@news.povray.org>, "Rod Reed" <rod### [at] bigpondcom> 
wrote:

>     I have only been playing with POVRay for about a week so am very new. I
> noticed in one of the examples a lightbulb was created but it had a
> "frosted" bulb. I would like to create a clear bulb so you can see the
> filament burning. The bulb was easy enough but I am having some trouble with
> the filament. So far I have tried using the looks_like a cylinder on a point
> light_source. The cylinder encloses the point of the light source.
> Regardless of what I do to the cylinder texture it always looks black. Can
> this approach going to give me the desired result? I have seen other
> postings that talk about "media" and "glow", should I be using one of these
> instead? I haven't gotten that far through the tutorial yet. Any advice is
> welcome, thanks in advance.

The filament texture looks black because you specified a black texture. 
"Glossy" is a finish with some highlights and reflection, neither of 
which would be very visible on a glowing filament, and you didn't 
specify a pigment, so it used the default black pigment.
What you want to do is specify a white pigment for your texture and an 
ambient value of 1 in the finish.

This will make your filament brightly lit, but if you look at a glowing 
filament in real life you will see a halo around it from scattering in 
the air between you and the filament and in the eye. This is what the 
talk of media or glow is about.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <chr### [at] maccom>
POV-Ray TAG e-mail: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
TAG web site: http://tag.povray.org/

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