I already answered one here if you were working on a normal map (which I’ve updated with more proper English if anyone interested). Personally, I like doing a lighting on a black void (huge void XL for scenebuild) or no light map because I can control the lighting more freely.

First, you would most likely need more than one light. I mean, you can put one light like this and BOOM! Finished.

WOW! What a masterpiece!

Or you can patiently playing around with lighting angles. In this pic, I used 5 lights; two for main source lights, one for rim light on the left and two for dim lights on the right. Most of the time, there can be more but I’d disabled the shadow since SFM didn’t allow more than 8 shadow lights.

Not the best but totally better.

The light color also matters, depending on what you were working on. Try not to use only one bright white light like in the first pic.You can editing your work later in editing software like photoshop, yes, but the original render should looking good too, so your work would look even better after the editing.

A lot of people asked, how am I doing this, so I finally managed to make some step-by-step! Though, everything is pretty trivial, and I can’t really describe every after-effect, since I’m using different ones almost every time (ó﹏ò｡) I’m using only Clip Studio Paint right now, but all these steps can be done in Photoshop, PaintTool SAI and, I guess, any other graphic software.

 Well, let’s see, what I could do for now.. 

I tried? I really don’t know, what else to say. You can ask questions, if you have them, I’ll try answering! In my opinion it’s still a matter of experience and experiments! I did not upload anything on my DA for years, but you can see, how lame I was in the beginning, lol - my DeviantART. Not every coloring can be a success too, don’t get discouraged and just try!

I just realised, that text might be too small, so I uploaded the same thing on imgur!

Hi and thank you! First of all, I’m not a decent sfm animator, only knew a bit of faceposing and some little movements…but I will try. Sorry, if there’s a grammar error or some mistake.

I’d recommend you to watch official sfm playlist first. It’s not the best but it would make you understand this program features and what it could do. This one by TTMR is great too.

Luckily, Arthur’s model is now having a proper rigged bones and faceposing (thanks to ArachnitCZ) which makes it easier to animated him and works along with most tutorials.

When animating models, I always done it with graph editor and preparing some rituals because goddamn I don’t know how to explain step by step but please take note that it will take time and patience when you were doing an animation. It could be hours just for 1-2 seconds. For now, I’ll try to type what I can explain.

To make a smooth(?) animation, you might need to animated the whole body even you just wanted your model to turn their head. For example, this one. I didn’t only moving his head but also his neck, his arms and his spine to make the movement looks natural as possible.

For faceposing, to give some life or makes it look natural, try to animated more than one part like an eyes squint when you want the model to looks angry or focus, not just the brows. You can try looking into a mirror or some references if you were doing a lip sync for a proper result.

Obviously, you can’t just bookmark two keys and got a good animation. As I said before, time and patience. [aggressively spam the M key on my keyboard]

Not kidding, those are the actual sketched that happened before I ended up with a cat.

How to Draw Jupiter, a tutorial by me

Because I’ve always hated those tutorials where they just skip a chunk of progress and suddenly it’s done like wtf how even did you do that

Updated: 19/10/2019 with better pics and English.

Here's a spy with just a normal map’s light which is way too bright and hard to add the additional lights in my opinion.

Right click on your model and select Show in Element Viewer > AnimationSet

Expand gameModel and find illumPostionDag. If there's no illumPostionDag, right click on gameModel and select add illumPostionDag attribute.

Right click on illumPostionDag > Set Element > DmeDag

Now your model would look like this.

And when you put the lighting on, oh hello, handsome rogue.

Try to place the lighting that would match the environment because your model might be looking too oddly dark.

Please note that this DmeDag thing doesn’t work every time. It could make the model only look slightly darker or maybe not at all. Also, there’s no point on doing this with no lighting map such as black void since everything’s already dark.

I'm also using Photoshop and PhotoLooks for the editing part.