Hey Everyone, I figured out a pretty neat way of cheating soft shadows using the dynamic lighting in Roll20. Here's an example: This is a map for the Hoard of the Dragon Queen campaign that I'm setting up. Here's a closeup of the two sets of lights that are creating those beautiful soft shadows: So you might be saying, " Well that's obvious, putting a bunch of lights close together create soft shadows... duh ". But it's not that simple. The problem is, is that "Dim" light, isn't all that dim. In fact, it appears that most of "Dim" light is actually just 50% brightness. So if you put 2 Dim lights next to each other, you get a full bright light. You put 6 of those lights together, and you barely get any soft shadows at all, because each pair of lights blow out the other's shadows. So how do you get around this? Well here are the light settings for the groups of lights I have outside the church: Yes, that's right, the dim starts at -500! This is sort of exploiting the fact that the "Dim" is mostly 50% bright for most of the gradient, but then it tapers off smoothly near the end. So by putting a negative number in for the "Dim", you are pulling the 50% bright into the token (and out of sight), and stretching the darker part out. So with the above settings, I can stack 2 groups of six lights, and the combined brightness is still lower that standard "Dim". So when the characters step into the church with darkvision (light settings of 60/0), their sight is only slightly brighter than the light around them. Here is what a player with Darkvision sees within the church: The player's darkvision stacks with the ambient light, but because that ambient light is lower than 50% bright, it is still "dark" in the church. This is easier to see if another player lights up a torch (light settings of 60/30): One final note, I have small torches in the church, that are giving off a very small amount of light in a smaller radius, just to help fill in the shadows a little (sort of a "ambient occlusion" effect). The light settings I use are 60/-100. The smaller the light radius, the larger the negative dim number needs to be, if the dim is too small, it won't emit any light at all. Obviously there are performance issues to factor in here, as you will be using a large amount of lights in your map, so be frugal with your light clusters. I've found the minimum lights needed in a cluster to provide decent soft shadows is about 3-4 lights. The smaller the cluster, the sharper the shadows will be. The larger the cluster, the softer the shadows will be, but the more lights you will need to create a smooth transition from dark to dim.
