Dynamic Lighting Guide

Hello everyone, For anyone struggling with how to get started using Dynamic Lighting I have setup a video guide to help walk you through the process. Check out the video here.

Awesome, much appreciated!

No problem.  More guides coming for people into D&D 5e.

Cross, Make sure you find the Walls API and include it for those with API access, it is brilliant for Dynamic Lighting situations.

(Thanks, Andrew!)

Pro tip, set your grid size to .25 before drawing in your dynamic lighting so you can more easily Shift/Click in the middle of walls and have a smoother look. Just remember to change it back to 1 afterwards.

Wow nice Ed.  I'll try that next time and see how I like it. Andrew, I have a couple more videos scheduled to come out soon.  I am going to attempt to do a "API Spotlight" section where I try to introduce some of these API's :)

Ed S. said: Pro tip, set your grid size to .25 before drawing in your dynamic lighting so you can more easily Shift/Click in the middle of walls and have a smoother look. Just remember to change it back to 1 afterwards. Why didn't I ever think of this? That's a brilliant tip.

Arthur B said: Ed S. said: Pro tip, set your grid size to .25 before drawing in your dynamic lighting so you can more easily Shift/Click in the middle of walls and have a smoother look. Just remember to change it back to 1 afterwards. Why didn't I ever think of this? That's a brilliant tip. Honestly, I just figured it out myself. My maps look so much better now. 

The Aaron said: (Thanks, Andrew!) I wonder how that gratuitous plug for a massive timesaving device got in there... I'm getting soft in my old age.  Time to TPK a party. Unleash the Kraken!

Arthur B said: Ed S. said: Pro tip, set your grid size to .25 before drawing in your dynamic lighting so you can more easily Shift/Click in the middle of walls and have a smoother look. Just remember to change it back to 1 afterwards. Why didn't I ever think of this? That's a brilliant tip. Fact: I regularly do that ALL the time when doing grid based maps in my external image editing programme. Sad fact: I have NEVER thought to do that in the app to apply accurate and quick DL. Fact the second: You learn something new everyday!! Thanks for the tip!

Why would setting your grid to .25 before dynamic lighting be beneficial?  Are you using the grid to draw dynamic lighting lines?  Is there a specific drawing tool (freehand vs shape) that this helps with?

It would allow you to use the snap to grid method I described in the video to trace more complicated lines (Such as a cave wall.)  After drawing Dynamic Lighting you would revert the grid back to the normal values for gameplay.

I'm glad people are finding that tip useful. :)

While we're on the topic, here's  another technique for quickly setting up Dynamic Lighting for Caves:  Make the background black.  Draw the dynamic lighting lines loosely around the outside, forming a cozy envelope. No need to be too careful here. Draw  Cut in Lines (baffles) perpendicular to your envelope, into each corner. If the background is black, players shouldn't notice that the DL lines aren't precisely hugging the walls. See it with the  black background at 9:04 At about 9:35 you can see where I  missed one and had to fix it . (Note: If your premade map has a lot of secret doors, the envelope+cut-in technique might not work for you. If you're building your own map, secret passages can be offset with a gap. )

I LIKE the cut in lines! So simple and expedient.

Plex, that works really well for caves and I will DEFINITELY be using that in the future.  Serious time savings.