Source Filmmaker

Source Filmmaker

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How to Make Things Glow
By Dead Tom
A tutorial on making things glow very slightly in SFM, with no external image editors like Photoshop or GIMP!
   
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Creating and positioning the light
Set up your scene the way you want to. The glow will be added later.



Now create an animation set for a light. You should see a button like the one below in the left pane on your screen.


Make sure this button (at the bottom of the viewport) looks like this.



This will make it to where you can position the light at your character's eyes.

Now, press the translate button (the 4 arrows and the dot, also at the bottom of the viewport) to drag the light around. Place it at the part you want to glow.



(Don't worry if it looks like they're using the Discord light theme, we fix that in the next step.)
Changing intensity and color of the light
If you're working on empty_void, be sure to enable lighting again. You can do this by right-clicking and clicking "Enable Lighting" in the dropdown.



Now that your lighting is enabled again, click on your light in the animation sets panel (the one on the left) and change the "intensity" option.



It's important that you don't wash the hell out of the colors because that makes it look terrible.

Now, you're going to want to scroll to the bottom of the panel where you found Intensity and find the color options. (pictured below)



Reposition the light to taste and you should end up with something like this:

Finishing off the scene
Now you can begin lighting the rest of the scene to taste. Be sure you don't use overly harsh lighting on your models that wash out the light we just spent all that time setting up. Eventually, you will be able to finish and render your scene.



Happy filmmaking!
17 Comments
Wonkehcheetah! 3 Jul, 2024 @ 1:03pm 
You can also enable uberlights in the element viewer, which enables a bunch of settings namely the cuton\cutoff as well as the near\far edge commands. These allow you to fix the lights shining through whatever you're lighting much better than the standard min\max distance commands.
coolygirl30000 23 Oct, 2023 @ 4:14pm 
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n0va 18 Oct, 2023 @ 1:49pm 
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shawty finna shake that ass fr 16 Oct, 2023 @ 10:33pm 
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MrManir 16 Oct, 2023 @ 9:17am 
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Biggest Boss 1 Jul, 2023 @ 6:24pm 
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2017rubberducky 29 Apr, 2023 @ 10:28am 
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Dead Tom  [author] 1 Apr, 2022 @ 3:14pm 
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spooky soot 1 Apr, 2022 @ 6:49am 
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Florp 18 Mar, 2022 @ 7:24pm 
seems obvious, but it's very helpful to know I dont need another 20 minute video! Thanks!