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We've been working on a composition to be put onto a flyer to send out to the public. The general meaning is to show that any idea you have can be modeled and rendered, whether the idea in real life is physically possible or not. The bulbs in the background and foreground are kept slightly out of focus to put more emphasis on the illuminated bulb.

At first, we used the "pearl" type bulb which illuminated the scene really nicely (see HERE), but we lost a lot of possible detail in the bulb itself, so we switched to the old glass type.

This has been rendering for a long time now and it still hasn't cleared up - noise wise - as much as I'd like. I do realise that light and glass take a long time to clear, however. Plus some of the noise adds to the realism. Anyway, here's the current version. Please let me know what you think (good or bad). It'd be a great help. Thanks!

very nice so far. ...what SL has it reached here?

One thing I would suggest is to rotate the bulb in the foreground so that it doesn't match the bulb on the right quite so much. Also, have you tried using some simulens diffraction? Might get some nice colors there.

I'm not expert on light bulbs.. but what if you were to give the glass
just a tiny bit of thickness?

- np

To me the glow inside the clear bulb with nothing on the outside looks strange. Maybe reduce the haze inside the bulb in favour of strong glare extending beyond the bulb boundary.
Agree that the gass looks like a bubble membrane at the moment and looking at a bulb for reference I think that some thickness would probably help.
You intend it to be B&W? but like the current excellent Apple imagery a dash of colour either in the tungsten glow or the caustics/ dispersion would bring it alive.

Nice idea, tricky to light.

Adman

Thanks for the comments everyone, much appreciated. Sorry for the late reply back.

sampson: The SL had reached about 18. It didn't seem to want to go much higher. :p

Bubbaloo: We thought about the bulbs being similar in angles, but the final composition is to be cropped which'll take a bit off each bulb. The way they're setout is to make the most of the cropped image as opposed to the full thing. I probably should've mentioned that. :p

We looked at the simulense options, but weren't too keen on the different colours. We just hoped to keep it plain white to hopefully emphasise the illumination of that middle bulb more.

NoahPhense: The glass does have slight thickness of about .20mm. Very thin, I know, but that's how the old clear bulbs are in real life. Maybe we could increase the thickness, though, just for visual effect.

adman: If a bulb was surrounded by just atmosphere, no walls or anything, it wouldn't produce a glow around the outside (to my knowledge and with what I've read up on). We looked into this and it looked more like a Photoshop-style outer glow when we added it, and didn't look all that correct which is ashame. I like the idea of the dash of colour though, and we have since tried out some styles in post production.

Thanks again for the tips and comments. Very helpful.