I'm making up an old (1950's style) bakelite radio with a backlit panel. This technique I've already tried using su2pov and then pov-ray to generate a good picture of this, and it is quite promising, but I am finding it difficult to get an even illumination behind the panel.

I thought a translucent panel (NOT transparent) would be a good way to do this - but there doesn't seem to be a translucent capability in su2pov.

I've tried bouncing a light off a wavy metallic surface and this works reasonably well, but gets very slow once there are several panels involved.

It might work to have a light surface in pov-ray, but as this works by having a number of point sources spread over surface I expect this would get very CPU intensive very quickly.

What techniques / tools would you recommend to do this?