My only point was that in order to get shading on a surface that ignores normals, it has to be done in whatever shader is attached to the surface port of the object's material. A light cannot make that kind of modification on it's own. A light shader only computes how much illumination reaches a surface. It's the material shader's job to apply the illumination to the surface.
As for incandescence, it's just a color value added to the surface's color (I think) after illumination has been computed. It does not consider normals. Similar to global ambience, but uniformly applied to the object's surface.
To recreate the effect as I understand it being described to me, you would have to write a shader that looks at a specified object in the scene (a light in this case) and modulates the incandescence intensity based on proximity from the shading point to the light. If you don't want to write a shader (or don't know how), you could write a self-installed custom operator to modulate the intensity of colors in a vertex color map because vertex colors can be read in the rendertree using the standard Vertex RGBA shader, then fed into whatever phenomena you have setup on the object. Either plugged into the incandescence of a material shader like Phong, or composited with some math nodes in the rendertree (such as a mix8color).
I'm sure if you rack your brain enough other solutions will come to the fro.
Matt
------------------------------Matt LindAnimator / Technical DirectorSOFTIMAGE certified instructor:SOFTIMAGE|3DSOFTIMAGE|XSIMatt.Lind(at)Mantom(dot)net
Date : Fri, 30 Nov 2007 20:51:39 -0500
To : XSI(at)Softimage.COM
