Is it possible to make brushes glow?

I think this has been mentioned before, but I searched and can't find any answers.

I'm trying to make a decent looking glow for my fluorescent lights (I'm using the fluorescent light texture defined in lights.rad). The lighting works great, but when looking at the actual light...it just doesn't look bright enough, so I want to add a nice glow effect to them.

I tried using env_lightglow...but it fades out when you get close, and doesn't quite look right anyway.

I also tried using env_sprite, but all the sprites are round, and the light source is rectangular...which looks weird.

The last thing I thought of was using a rectangular brush about the size of my lights textured with a nice glow texture, tied to a func_brush entity with the render mode set to Glow or World Space Glow (not sure what the difference is, but the latter is used by Valve for most light glows). In Hammer it looks pretty good, but in-game it's rendered without any alpha...it draws the black parts of the texture along with the white part.

Is there any way to get the render mode to work properly with a bush entity, or is there some other way to make a good-looking rectangular glow?

Yes, tie your object to a func_brush, and select "glow" as your
perfered "Render Mode". I think you'll get it to work if you experiment
with the settings a bit.

This doesn't seem to work. The closest I got was when I tried using an "additive" texture, but even then it was tinted purple when I set the render mode to "Glow", and tinted yellow when I set it to "Additive".

It looks like it just may not be possible.

I'm not sure I fully understood what you mean, but here goes: Put a func_illusionary, about the same size with the brush you want to glow, over the mentioned brush. Make sure the surface of the illusionary doesn't overlap with the brush (don't know how to explain, let's just say the illusionary needs to be half a unit off the surface of the brush). Then set the illusionary like this:

RenderFX "Slow Wide Pulse" (for example)
RenderMode "Additive"
Rendernt "60"

Not sure if setting rendercolor will do anything. Doubt it.

Then look for a blank red/blue/yellow texture and apply it to the func_illusionary.
This should make your brush glow (I used this effect with HL1, and worked nicely).

You can also make a white (or any color solid texture) add that texture
to your
.rad
file Then place a brush in the shape you want and apply your new
texture to it.

Now to make it 'glow' place one or two env_sprite along the length of the brush.

It should look fine in game.