I am trying to give these splines a way to mimic a light source that will erase the look they have but keep there shape. I have read that you can make a object project lights like neon but thats not what I really want. Those splines would be fairy looking lights that will barelly illuminate my scene but give a soft dark light color for each wings of my cathedral. It would be great if anyone could offer some advice or tuts to contribute my poor lightning skill.

Thx in advance.

That’s what I did but I dont see any light source emiting from the spline and I even think i had it turn on when I took that render pict that is shown here=/

Your render does not look like a render...which suggests you do not have any materials or lights in your scene, right?  I think you need to get that set up first before getting into fine-tuning the self illumination.

--3ds Max Design 2009 64bit, Direct3D 9, Win Vista Premium 64, 3ghz quadcore Xeon, Quadro FX1700--

Your render looks suspiciously like Scanline with default lighting.  The Self Illumination of the material will not add light to the scene unless you are using Mental Ray.

If you want to use Scanline, I’d make the material on the shapes slightly self-illuminated, and put a colored omni at each.  Exclude those shapes from shadow casting, and you’ll probably want to use Attenuation on the lights.

3DS Max Design 2011 64-bit - Advantage Pack
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA

That was mainly default and no light or anything at all beside the modeling and self illumination. I spent some time texturing and I switched to MR then added a omni light but still no lights emitting from these splines. I will try again later to play with the lights and such which is the first time really I get into lights setup with my 5 months into 3DS. I think to get the effect I want I will need to play with particle.

Here a pict to my altar at where its at:

I still got the whole Cathedral to Texture and remodel many objects which will take me away from lights fora while =x

Well I made it off but definetly not what I want with this pict. I will try to find a pict to what i really want to make these spline look like.

I supose we can add self illumination to particle aswell and have them follow those splines which is something else I havent had time to play with. Anyway have a good weekend all!