How to make better looking lights/lightbulbs Just throwing an emission shader just yields a completely solid light, which i don't want. Throwing a glass-like shader on a bulb made around a light (via emission) basically just shows the light and the glass would be nearly invisible.

Not like this:



Something like this:





(The brighter bulb, on the right)
Try to look, whre does the lightbulb really emit light and model this part, and make the outer part really out of glass. Try to do verything like it looks in a real lightbulb and then tweak your values until youre happy. Except they are in a far distance, then you might just use an light source in form of  bulb in purpose of shorter render times.