Lighted buttons (Glow) (english)

Question	Hi, I'm trying to determine the best way to make a 'control' panel of sorts with lighted buttons on the control panel (typical space ship thing). What I would really like to see is a little glow around the buttons when they are 'on'.

Sean Lewkiw	We did something like this a while ago. First we tried rendering the button seperately, and then blurring and brightening at the compositing stage to give it kind of a glow. Looked okay, but not great. Then we tried using a flare with SP1 and a red light. Animate the intensity of the light, and you'll have a nice looking glow around the button. Of course, if you have hundreds of buttons, maybe a few flares combined with the first (compositing) method might be more practical.
Steve Beuret	I had some luck recreating LEDs by putting a small sphere just inside the model and turning on static glow. You have to mess with the scale of the object and the amount of glow until you get it to the point where the glow is visible and the model is not. I don't remember what else I had going on, but I think that was it.
Dan Ziegler	Try using static blur in the material. If you want the buttons to have hard outlines and a blur around them, duplicate each button, scale it slightly bigger, and give it a mostly transparent material with a little static blur. It should give you the 'halo' effect you're looking for.
Ian Faichnie	How about using the FX Director Glows (uses light though as the source and you might want the glow from an object), gives pretty good results nice and quickly, apparently Porl at The Mill uses them so they must be good.