I created this blend for weekend challenge #548 over at blenderartist.org.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?17-Weekend-Challenge
The theme for that week was: Soviet Technology.
After some searching, I discovered that Russian Oleg Losev reported creation of the first LED in 1927.
So I decided to model an LED light. I used Blender 2.69 and rendered in Cycles.
The modeling was not that difficult, but getting the materials to do what I wanted was a struggle that I feel I didn't quite meet. However, I am still somewhat pleased with the final result.
This image is straight out of Blender with minimal compositing, and no additional tweaking with any external image editors.
Cheers.
Thanks oldtimer, for the compliment and the observation. I just went and looked through all of my reference images and noticed it. most of the images I used were close ups that cut off the leads before they ended but at least two of them showed the varying lead lengths. Good catch!
Very nice. One observation: the cathode lead should be shorter than the positive one (or viceversa). Regards.