Does anyone know or have a resource on how to implement incandescence in a shader? I am trying to make a 1 for 1 mapping between the attributes I get from Maya materials (at least the common ones) and the shaders in my engine. I found some good math for lambert, phong, and blinn materiels in a textbook. However, they use every day attributes like diffuse, intensity, etc. I can't find anything usable on incandescence. I barely even understand what it is. It is light emitted from an object, but not a light source? Examples maya gives are lava, sparks, electricity, etc.

I'm not positive, but this sounds an awful lot like the emissive color. Basically, the emissive color component has no dependence on light source, view angle, normal, anything. This is consistent with lava, sparks, electricity, etc. To get fancy, you could also include a small light source, since these things do shed light on objects directly around them, but emissive by itself doesn't do this.

To implement in a shader, just add it on to the final color.