In the Shortcuts thread, AirCanada was asking about glowing Minecraft armor. Cakery mentioned needing to use transparent parts to make a glow. I thought this would be an interesting experiment to try adding a glowing effect to a solid-colored part, so I decided to give it a shot and here are my results:

All of the renders use a transparent piece with the emission turned on. I'll reuse a graphic from a different thread to explain how to do turn on emission for transparent materials:

Open the 3D Rendering mode by selecting the dropdown option on the upper left of the Workshop. In the Lighting tab, scroll down to the Emission section and use the dropdown to select the transparent material that you are using and hit the (+) button to add it to the list of emission materials. Then adjust the Emission value to your liking. In my tests, I used 1.0 for all of my examples. Do this for each glowing material that you'll use.

**Test #1: Simple Duplication **

On my first attempt, I just duplicated a brick and changed the material. I wanted to see if I could get a purple glow from the blue brick. The render engine did not like this and I got some weird bleed through effects.

**Test #2: Simple Duplication and Shift **

On this attempt, I tried shifting my transparent piece back ever so slightly. I changed the transform grid from Medium to Small. Then I shifted the transparent brick away from the camera by .2mm in each of the X, Y, and Z directions. This can also be done by selecting the transparent part, then clicking the Move tab. Then select Translation | [Axis of choice] | 0.2 (or -0.2) | Apply. This gave the part an effect of emitting a small amount of purple.

**Test #3: Overlapping Glow Areas **

For this attempt I wanted to see how it looked on Steve, so I loaded him up with armor. In addition, I wanted the Blue part to glow as well. To do this, I first built him and then grouped the armor pieces together, making them the Main Armor. Then I duplicated them and shifted them toward the camera by 0.2mm in X, Y, and Z and called this the Front Glow. I duplicated the Main Armor and shifted it away from the camera. This is the Back Glow. To strengthen the back glow I duplicated it again, shifting one away from the camera in X and the other away in Z. The more you shift these, the more pronounced the effect is. Here is an exaggerated example of this method:

I tested different materials, so the bricks in front of Steve represent the Front Glow, Main Armor and Back Armor. I also varied the amount that the back glows were shifted. You can see this easily if you look at the model from the top down.

This model can be opened using this Library Link.

Here is the render result (I used the free render engine, so the quality is not the best, but you get the idea):

This is a list of the materials I used from Left to Right:

Steve 1 (Opal Blue)
Main Armor: Medium Azure (322)
Front Glow: Trans Blue Opal (362)
Back Glow: Trans Bright Violet (126)
Back Glow 2: Trans Flour Blue (143)

Steve 2 (Glitter Blue)
Main Armor: Medium Azure (322)
Front Glow: Trans Light Blue Glitter (129)
Back Glow: Trans Bright Violet (126)

Steve 3 (Trans Blue - Silver Ink)
Main Armor: Silver Ink (2004)
Front Glow: Trans Light Blue (42)
Back Glow: Trans Bright Violet Glitter (129)

Steve 4 (Trans Blue - Chrome)
Main Armor: Chrome (309)
Front Glow: Trans Light Blue (42)
Back Glow: Trans Bright Violet (126)
Back Glow 2: Trans Medium Violet (143)

The whole point of this is to give you a base to experiment with. I'd start with changing materials, the emission values, and how much the glows are offset. I'm sure someone more creative than me can come up with much better results.