How to create an outer glow by using SetBackdrop

What I'm going to describe here is a technique that is used by Neal and Garry to create outer glows of any color for any frame in any size with the need of only one texture.

This is done by making full use of the SetBackdrop Widget.

Before we start we need two textures.
- one for the background
- one for the outer glow

Both textures will be of white color. The alpha layer of the background texture will be filled with full white aswell.

The trick comes with the alpha layer of the glow (edge) texture. [glow_alpha.gif]



This texture is much wider, in fact inside of the glow texture are 8 textures and the SetBackdrop uses any of those parts for specific parts of the border.

Thanks to the SetBackdrop function call the size of the origin-frame doesn't matter.

Check the glow.lua for more.

This can be used to add cool outer glows to any frames that allow the use of SetBackdrop.

Mark the attached images with your mouse to see the. They are white and thus "invisible" at first.

For possible results check the shapebar and the bar images.

Link to Garry's mod: xuButtonShadow : WoWInterface Downloads : Miscellaneous

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Attached Files

glow.lua (1.5 KB, 200 views)