I'm trying to make a piece of armor, and have specific parts of it glow/be full bright (trying to make a transparent hologram the floats behind the character as a back item). Is there a way to set up glow-maps for textures in starbound, while still having transparency?
I'm not sure about armour specifically, but I managed to make several items with glow maps very easily. All I did was copy and adapt some of the code from the "orientation" part of the glow chest code (/assets/packed/objects/glowchest/glowchest.object), making the glow map is as simple as making an exact copy of the item's sprite but leaving the parts you want to glow as transparent on the glow map. The game then compares the two images with the code you stole borrowed and uses them to work out where to glow. Of course, I'm a noob at starbound myself, so I hope you find this useful.
I assume you're using FutaraDragon's Fullbright Shader mod? Fullbright-on-armour is only supported with that shader hack installed, as FD literally rewrites one of the game's OpenGL 2.0 shaders so that any pixels with the alpha value of 0xFE will display with full alpha and at maximum brightness. All transparency values other than 0xFE (byte value 254 out of 255, or floating point 0.99607843137 out of 1.0) will display normally, so you're good to go for any other transparency value. If you're trying to use a smooth gradient and an alpha value of 0xFE ends up in there somewhere, those stray pixels will appear fully bright when using that mod: the only solution is to hunt down any pixels with an alpha of 0xFE using your graphical editor and change them to 0xFF. I can't think of any easy method off-hand of automating that in either Photoshop or GIMP, though.
So, after loosing my personal modding work to a dead SSD a year or so ago, I've finally re-downloaded Starbound, and in trying to figure out how to get my custom syth-avali's eyes to glow, I did a google search... and one of the first results is this forum post of me, asking the exact same issue, 3 years ago. Thanks, past me. For posterity: FutaraDragon's Fullbright Shader mod was, and is, pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Thank you for the help! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2422986190 successful eye glow for a Synthvali and its faithful bot~