[5e] Flame light source - best practises

[WinterSoldier7]

Whenever I want fire and flames on my maps, which is seemingly a lot, I set up a light source as a torch and dot it around. When, really, what I want is stronger light and intense flickering.

Tired of doing this manually on each map, what would be the best approach to creating a template? It's not for tokens, so would ideally be something that can somehow be added to the light source drop-down - is that an extension?

As a final idea, I was thinking of highlighting all of those Torch light sources and changing them all at once..

[Zacchaeus]

You can create a fire and flames by selecting any of the presets and changing the colour, bright radius, falloff, dim radius, and falloff and the rate at which it flickers before you place anything. Then place the 'torch'. Alternatively use any of the presets as you say and then select them all and edit all of them.

If you want you could then add a clouds or myst fx layer and mask out the areas that aren't fire and flames.

[WinterSoldier7]

Ahhh, yes I can change the preset! Of course!

Thanks for the mist tip, that combined with some animated flames... it looks lovely.

To confirm then; no way to create my own present alongside the torch for future ease-of-use?

[Zacchaeus]

No, you can't create a new preset for lights. The limit is four and is built into the client.

[WinterSoldier7]

No worries, I'll make a note of the changes for future. Thanks, Zacchaeus

[pindercarl]

The presets for lighting are defined in the rulesets gameelements.xml. It shouldn't be too difficult to create an extension to add new lighting presets.

[LordEntrails]

If an area is torch lit 'enough' I don't place individual lights. That becomes computer intensive. Instead I use ambient light and an FX.

The second consideration I do is if lights are going to overlap, then you need to understand how FG will combine the lights. There is a long detailed discussion somewhere on the forums here, but in short, if you have two lights you want to be red and they have RGB values of 255, 130, 130 and the overlap (bright area). The resulting color of the overlap area will be 255, 255, 255 (white). This is because the computer adds the values together and then clips them at the max value of 255.

So instead, if you are going to have them overlap, try something closer to 175, 75, 75. The overlap area will then be 255, 150, 150 and will still have a red tint.

[Moon Wizard]

Also, just to clarify, you can have more than 4 lighting presets configured; but vision presets are limited.

Regards,
JPG