Simple outer glow / light shadow effect for fonts?

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0 votes

Hi, I want to create the following effect with the text in my game that you get when in illustrator you choose "Effect -> Stylize -> Outer Glow" and select the mode "multiply"

enter image description here

I think it makes the font stand more out and looks better.
How can I achieve this effect on a font in Godot? Tried using the environment glow/bloom effect but couldn't get it looking like this. Also searched for shaders, but found nothing like that.

Godot version 3.4
in Engine by (207 points)

1 Answer

+1 vote

I don't have a good answer for you, but I have tried something similar in the past and found it impossible.
The way Godot treats text, each letter has a very small, tight bounding box, and the glow effect gets cropped around each letter.

If you manage to get an outline shader working you'll have a good starting base, since outlines are similar to what you want, except for the soft gradient. Example of outline shader: https://godotshaders.com/shader/2d-outline-stroke/
You'll see that it doesn't really work with text. Note that Godot has an special "outline" parameter for text; I believe this is a developer's hack to get around this limitation.

Another approach would be somehow duplicating the text as an image, perhaps rendering it to a viewport texture, modulating and blurring said texture and showing it behind the actual text.

by (194 points)
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