Can you make a glowing orb?

[Nuisance_Barge]

Basically, What I need is something that glows. nothing fancy, nothing special, just as long as its blue. The reason why I ask is because I have a black tile that isn't affected by light, and I've been wanting to know how anyway.
EDIT:
Just realized that my request is extremely vague, I'm wondering if you can make a glowing orb of some kind that the camera can see and casts light in all directions.

[Pte Jack]

What about particles, there are a few glowing type particles or do you need it to cast a shadow as well?

[ConfederateJoe]

Make a simple model with an emmissive texture, turn up bloom in the camera settings, and attach several lights at multiple angles to it with wide FOVs.

[Nuisance_Barge]

Originally posted by ConfederateJoe:

Make a simple model with an emmissive texture, turn up bloom in the camera settings, and attach several lights at multiple angles to it with wide FOVs.

What's an emissive texture?

[Marco Skoll]

Originally posted by Nuisance_Barge:

I'm wondering if you can make a glowing orb of some kind that the camera can see and casts light in all directions.

Define "casts light in all directions". Does it merely need to glow from every angle, or does it actually have to be a light source?

A model material (materials for map tiles are different) can be set relatively easily to always act as if it is in bright light. This produces the effect of "glowing", because it doesn't need external light to look brightly lit.

However... it doesn't actually produce any light. Put another model nearby, and it won't cast any light on it.

If you want it to cast light on other models, you'll need to use map lights... and well. That's a little problematic.

The user controlled lights in SFM actually work through what is called "projected textures". (And yes, they can actually be used to project textures!)

You can imagine them a bit like an old school slide projector - you have a bulb shining through a slide (by default, it's blank), and it projects that texture. Moving the virtual slide closer to the virtual bulb makes the projected image bigger. Moving it further away makes it smaller.

It's very cool... but it has the limitation that you can't move the slide back through the bulb. At an absolute maximum, the lights can project a 180 degree front arc (although the textures and shadows completely give up at that angle), but that's it.

As such, there's no such thing as a 360 degree light in SFM, and you have to imitate the effect through the use of multiple lights.

If you don't need shadows, you can take two shadows disabled lights, remap their angle sliders to 180 degrees, and lock them back to back.

If you do need shadows, the standard solution is to take six lights, set them to 90 degree square fields of view and lock them together as if they were inside a cube, each pointing at one side.
Unfortunately though, six lights is the lion's share of your eight available shadowed lights, so very few other available shadowed light sources in the scene if you do it that way.
(It's also very difficult to tesselate fewer than six lights).

Any of those six directions you can spare not having light (or even just shadows) frees up a lot of lighting for the rest of the scene.

If you're clever and careful, I have faked shadowed 360 lights with just two lamps (by being very careful about which way the lights were facing, so the camera never saw where they weren't pointing).

[Nuisance_Barge]

hmmmmmm.... I've gone forward a bit with it, and I think all I need is a glowing particle effect, I can simulate the light coming off it. I'll look through the particle effects tomorrow and see if i can find anything that'll fit the bill. Thanks for your help.