How does one go about creating a glow effect around an object that has node set to emission? Basically a slight gaussian type glow to emulate the appearance of a light bulb is what I’m trying to achieve. I’m using cycles for blender 2.6, and its awesome!
Cycles itself won’t render glow. What you are thinking about is the glow created by pixels that are actually brighter than white. You can achieve this effect in post-processing either by using the built-in compositor or with an image manipulation tool like Photoshop. I won’t go into too much detail here but it comes down to filtering a layer for extremely bright pixels, blurring them and adding the result back to the original image. If you want to add this effect in an external application make sure to work with EXR as your image format, the 32bit depth has all the brightness information you could ever want for this effect.