Help new Pro subscriber need help with the FX tools

I am needing help figuring out how to make my own custom FX effects. I am wanting to make custom one's for spells my characters will use. Please any advice, websites or youtube videos would be appreciated. Thank you for your help.

Do you need help getting started , developing a specific special effect , or something else?

Some of it i understand. What im confused about is how to make the shapes. How do you make a beam, a 15'ft cone, 30ft cone and 60ft cone. Id like to make a fireball the exact size the spell says but im not sure how to make it larger when i click the screen. ive read the help page on wiki about FX. But im not quite sure what does what. I tried looking for instructional videos online through youtube but i couldn't find anything. Thanks for the help.

I experimented quite a bit with special effects - you'll have to experiment with the custom effects if you really want control over what you're doing, and by experiment, I mean mess with every setting over and over until you get close to what you want.&nbsp; One thing to keep in mind is the "angle: -1" that allows you to specify the angle when the effect is generated.&nbsp; For example, this is what a 30' cone of flame looks like when it's a custom effect:&nbsp; { "angle": -1, "angleRandom": 30, "duration": 15, "emissionRate": 50, "endColour": [0, 0, 0, 0], "endColourRandom": [0, 0, 0, 0], "gravity": {"x":0.01, "y":0.01}, "lifeSpan": 20, "lifeSpanRandom": 3, "maxParticles": 1000, "size": 25, "sizeRandom": 15, "speed": 12, "speedRandom": 1.5, "startColour": [150, 90, 50, 1], "startColourRandom": [30, 20, 0, 0] } The angleRandom is the property that kind of sets the constraints on the particles, keeping them in a 60 degree cone (30 to either side of the basic angle), but otherwise they randomize within that cone. The "length" of the cone you need to set by looking at a combination of lifespan and speed. The example above is about a 30' cone roughly and can be set to start from the player.&nbsp; The same sixty-degree cone for a short range acid-spray, as an example, might look like this:&nbsp; { "angle": -1, "angleRandom": 30, "duration": 30, "emissionRate": 6, "endColour": [30, 20, 20, 0], "endColourRandom": [0, 10, 0, 0], "lifeSpan": 30, "lifeSpanRandom": 1, "maxParticles": 300, "size": 14, "sizeRandom": 3, "speed": 2, "startColour": [20, 60, 20, 1], "startColourRandom": [20, 60, 20, 0.5] } The lifespan of particles is longer, but the speed is much shorter - so it's a small cone that's fairly dense...&nbsp; Some older examples are here:&nbsp; <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/FX_Library" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/FX_Library</a>

A beam looks like this:&nbsp; { "angle": -1, "angleRandom": 0.5, "duration": 1, "emissionRate": 5000, "endColour": [0, 0, 0, 0], "endColourRandom": [0, 0, 0, 0], "gravity": {"x":0.01, "y":0.01}, "lifeSpan": 5, "lifeSpanRandom": 1, "maxParticles": 5000, "size": 10, "sizeRandom": 0, "speed": 120, "speedRandom": 121, "startColour": [150, 90, 50, 1], "startColourRandom": [30, 20, 0, 0] } This is the one I use for scorching ray. Note the duration is miniscule as is the angle random while the speed is ridiculous. The speedRandom is set wide as well otherwise you get a very fast bullet instead of a beam.&nbsp; A bullet looks like this:&nbsp; { "angle": -1, "angleRandom": 0, "duration": 50, "emissionRate": 20000, "endColour": [250, 250, 250, 0], "endColourRandom": [20, 20, 20, 0], "gravity": {"x":0.001, "y":0.001}, "lifeSpan": 300, "maxParticles": 5, "sharpness": 100, "sharpnessRandom": 0, "size": 10, "sizeRandom": 0.1, "speed": 55, "speedRandom": 0.1, "startColour": [250, 250, 250, 1], "startColourRandom": [20, 20, 20, 0.25] } Very high emission rate to get most of them stacked simultaneously, zero for angleRandom, a high speed so it can be seen (not too high), while the speedRandom is very very small.&nbsp;

I see a wiki update in the near future. Awesome work Pat. ;-P&nbsp;

Awesome guys thank you very much. This should help a lot.&nbsp; Well I have finished my first customized FX effect. This is for the Cone of Cold. Please take a look and tell me what you guys think. thanks for the help again: { "angle": -1, "angleRandom": 30, "duration": 25, "emissionRate": 75, "endColour": [90, 90, 175, 1], "endColourRandom": [0, 0, 0, 0], "gravity": {"x":0.01, "y":0.01}, "lifeSpan": 30, "lifeSpanRandom": 35, "maxParticles": 5000, "size": 15, "sizeRandom": 15, "speed": 12, "speedRandom": 1.5, "startColour": [90, 90, 175, 1], "startColourRandom": [0, 0, 0, 0.25] }

Good! Looks like it abates at about 60' and starts with an angle of 60 degrees, which makes it match the spell - certainly gives the sense of what a cone of cold might look like!&nbsp;

Greetings ... I have just became a Pro member and have found some CustomFX, one of which I liked and pasted to use in my game. Only problem is when I use it it only shows in the top most left corner of the map. No matter where I click on the map, it only appears in the top most left corner. Here are the settings I got from a website ... { "maxParticles": 550, "size": 20, "sizeRandom": 15, "lifeSpan": 19, "lifeSpanRandom": 19, "emissionRate": 25, "speed": 1, "speedRandom": 0, "gravity": [0.0, 0.0], "angle": 0.0, "angleRandom": 360, "startColour": [60, 60, 60, 60], "startColourRandom": [30, 30, 30, 30], "endColour": [0, 0, 60, 0], "endColourRandom": [0,0,60,0], "sharpness": 45, "sharpnessRandom": 10 }

Yeah, they changed the notation on gravity to be object notation instead of an array: gravity: {"x":0.01, "y":0.01} So, a fixed version would be:&nbsp; { "maxParticles": 550, "size": 20, "sizeRandom": 15, "lifeSpan": 19, "lifeSpanRandom": 19, "emissionRate": 25, "speed": 1, "speedRandom": 0, "gravity": {"x": 0.01, "y": 0.01}, "angle": 0.0, "angleRandom": 360, "startColour": [60, 60, 60, 60], "startColourRandom": [30, 30, 30, 30], "endColour": [0, 0, 60, 0], "endColourRandom": [0,0,60,0], "sharpness": 45, "sharpnessRandom": 10 } Also, "sharpness" is deprecated apparently&nbsp; - it does no "harm" to include it, but it does nothing.

I'm curious if there are statistics on how often FX are used - frankly, I use custom effects a lot more because of the Page FX and Status FX API scripts - if the method of using Page FX as environmental effects were more standard I wonder if use would increase.&nbsp;&nbsp;

I don't use them at all. Normally, there's no issue with them. However, I usually run a game with two instances, one for me, the GM, and a second, dummy account that logs in as a player, for recording sessions. Something about running two sessions slows FX down to a crawl. With only one instance, no problem. So I dropped them.

In my recently ended 4 year game I built spell macros for ~3000 spells (good ole 3.5e!) that largely incorporated fx where appropriate. The players enjoyed casting a variety of spells just to see what the effect would be which kept it nice and varied... I'm certainly at the extreme end however, in other games I've used them manually to accentuate certain things, a camp fire in the distance, a fireball ambush, that creeping feeling of doom etc (the latter was harder but more fun, bubbling-death randomly dropped onto players who were feeling ill at ease... really had them panicking!).

As a for-instance for me, I've used the Page-FX for swamp fairy-lights, special effects in the Shadowlands, campfires and fireplace fires, and currently underwater accent effects to help convey the sense that players are actually beneath the ocean - it complements the audio nicely. The only issue with using them as environmental effects is they aren't blocked by walls on the lighting layer or dimmed by low/no lighting. One neat thing is to pair a very localized effect with a light source on dark maps with no blocking of line of sight from the lighting layer - becoming an island of animated light in the darkness.&nbsp;

On the rare occasion that I play rather than GM, I tend to use fx. Blood splatter for weapon attacks, or other things for spells. In sci-fi games, I like laser beams and such. I also use breath fx for some monsters. Oh, in my Starfinder Helm Controls script, I used fx to make rocket streams appear when the ship moved, but I turned them off because I was switching to player mode once we figured out that sensor range is limited, and we shouldn't be able to see each other past some distance (the fx is visible through dynamic lighting). Snow would be nice on some maps, but one of my players said the pageFX was too much for his Lappy 486. One thing that might be neat in starfinder is to indicate crit effect status via fx. Burn condition shows them on fire, corrode has some acid effect, other stuff.

There is an API script that allows you to have an FX on status marker called oddly enough "Status FX" - and you can set up whatever combination of status marker and standard or custom FX you want, with the FX appearing and repeating on the token.&nbsp;

Nice, I'll have to try it out.

Just to save you head scratching and frustration that often comes to new users of the script, the player ribbon has to be on the page you are viewing, or the FX won't run. That's a very common stumbler. Bast L. said: Nice, I'll have to try it out.