I finally got it! The ol' plasma-chuk lives! Turns out, in this case, that using Preserve Hue and not having the black body or color picks from the light tab when calculating layers were the tricks for me. It's been a doozy! Nearly broke my record for test renders...

My cool little story I made up to give him a little history: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2339052

crimsonworx.com; free ebooks and previews

I've bowed down to facebook: https://www.facebook.com/crimsonworx