How to create a glow effect for lights in architecture

The work of an architectural visualization artist is not constrained to deal with commercial projects for architecture. From time to time we have to work on the design of a scene for a game or even special effects for a small studio. Besides the modeling of large scenarios and buildings, it seems like architectural visualization artists tend to be requested to work on light design more often then I expected. Because of that, I`m always trying to find ways to learn more about tricks and techniques to create effects related to light design.

Learn how to work with IES Lights and Unbiased render engines is a big help, but sometimes we must work with tools like the compositor to create light such as a light glow without external render engines. I just found a great tutorial created by an artist called DDD that shows an interesting technique to create a light glow effect already in Blender 2.50.

Light Glow Effect Using the Compositor in Blender 2.5 Tutorial from DDD on Vimeo.

At the video description page in Vimeo the author of the tutorial describes that this video was a combination of two other tutorials. There you will find the links to those tutorials and the .blend file for this tutorial available to download.