I want to create some kind of lighting effect for the engines but I quite new to lighting in general. To be honest, I'm used to sticking a single point lamp in.
From the tutorials I've seen, none of them are for cycles and focus on lighting a whole object anyway, not particular faces of it. The engines I want to add the effect to are the 3 on each wing and the 2 in the middle.
I tried following this (How to create a fire/light effect in a spaceship engine) previously but none of it is making too much sense.
The first method shown was using volumetric materials. I've never heard of that before while working in Blender but I thought I myswell try it still but the whole method itself was just too complicated. I just didn't understand half of what it said.
With the composition method, I used the same nodes (with same values) as in http://i.stack.imgur.com/tzaT8.jpg yet I didn't notice any change in my render whatsoever. I guess those effects were supposed to effect the picture as a whole? I don't have any experience with either nodes or composition previously before this.