Making a map look like its night.

I use plenty of build your own/pre-made map packs and was wondering if anyone knows of a way to make things seem darker, and moonlit.

Try using a token with a blue aura and a radius that's larger than your map.  Make sure everyone can see the token's aura.  Add two blue auras or copy/paste your "mood" token to increase the effect or mix other colors.

The easiest thing I can think of that will give you the best results is photoshop or llustrator work

If you use Photoshop,  and if you are downloading your assets,  you can open the maps or tiles in there,  and you can get a variety of ways to get that look.  The quickest and easiest way would be to create a layer on top of the map layer,  and fill the entire layer with black, then change the layer style and opacity around until you get a darkness you are comfortable with. Id suggest playing around with the layer styles "multiply" and "overlay", as multiply gives really good shading and darker tones,  and overlay gives excellent glows for colors and such.  Changing the layer opacity of your shadow layer to in between 30%-65% should give you a good range (and inside the range I generally work inside on my maps).  Another cool thing you can do is find some neat brushes for PS,  or create your own (if you know how to do that) and use a grungy or smoke brush to erase little sections of shadows created in the shadow layer I was talking about. Id definitely change the opacity of my brush down to around 20-40% when doing that,  so you can slowly fade or transition your grungy effect into your shadows. Hopefully that all makes sense and helps. 

I use a transparent overlay which I can 'tint' in the app to give any number of effects, blue for twilight, purple for fey lands, grey for smoke filled areas etc, I also have a couple of others to do the same but also to lend a visual element such as mist, rain, heavy smoke etc. Just makes it hard to have any kind of reordering of a map layer once it has been applied :(

Ziechael said: Just makes it hard to have any kind of reordering of a map layer once it has been applied :( I bet you could use a script to manage that...

Ziechael said: I use a transparent overlay which I can 'tint' in the app to give any number of effects, blue for twilight, purple for fey lands, grey for smoke filled areas etc, I also have a couple of others to do the same but also to lend a visual element such as mist, rain, heavy smoke etc. Just makes it hard to have any kind of reordering of a map layer once it has been applied :( I like that idea. It wouldn't be hard to control with TokenMod. Have you noticed any performance issues with a huge overlay like that?

I used auras to color the map and made it visible to my players, what do y'all think? I think it works and thank you for all of the help! Before  After

The Aaron said: Ziechael said: Just makes it hard to have any kind of reordering of a map layer once it has been applied :( I bet you could use a script to manage that... It's rare enough that I need to reorder something on the map layer alongside using an overlay so I don't worry about it to be honest... that being said I do use a script to alter doors/traps on the map layer without having to interact with them directly so I guess there is that...

keithcurtis said: Ziechael said: I use a transparent overlay which I can 'tint' in the app to give any number of effects, blue for twilight, purple for fey lands, grey for smoke filled areas etc, I also have a couple of others to do the same but also to lend a visual element such as mist, rain, heavy smoke etc. Just makes it hard to have any kind of reordering of a map layer once it has been applied :( I like that idea. It wouldn't be hard to control with TokenMod. Have you noticed any performance issues with a huge overlay like that? Nope, never once... the only potential issue  i've had is that the overlay can often be the largest image on the map which sets it as the page picture in the page bar but that could even be solved by using 4x quarter sized layers. My overlays are usually 70*70 pixel images stretched or 350*350 pixel ones when I want some detail like rain/mist etc so they aren't even big hits on the old library usage either :)