Lighting

Lighting in PostRoll lets you set the mood of every scene — from a candle-lit tavern to a thunderstorm at sea. You can place individual lights with full creative control, dial in a scene-wide mood, set the time of day, layer in atmospheric fog and weather, and let lights reveal fog of war for your players.

This section covers everything you can do with lighting. Pick a topic from the cards below, or start with Lights — basics if this is your first time placing a light.

How lighting is organised

Lighting is split between two places in the VTT:

• Light Tool (toolbar — the lighting icon, shortcut L) — place and configure individual lights one-by-one. Each light has its own colour, shape, animation, and behaviour.
• Scene Lighting panel (also in the toolbar) — scene-wide settings like ambient darkness, mood, time of day, weather, fog memory, and preset packs.

Scene Lighting wraps over everything; individual lights then punch through the darkness. A scene with a high ambient darkness and a few well-placed torches looks like a dungeon; the same scene with low darkness and a “Daylight” mood looks like an open courtyard.

In this section

Lights — basics

Place a light, set its position, radius, colour, and shape. Start here if you’ve never placed a light before. — Lights basics

Radii, edges, and shadows

Bright / dim radii, edge softness, soft penumbras, occlusion roughness, self-exclude, casting shadows on tokens. — Radii and edges

Presets and effects

Apply a preset, build your own effect stack, blend modes, gobos, colour grading per light. — Presets and effects

Animation and timeline

Flicker, animation modifiers, keyframe timelines, attached particle emitters. — Animation and timeline

Scene mood and time of day

Ambient darkness, scene mood palette, time of day, spatial darkness regions. — Scene mood and time

Atmosphere and weather

Atmospheric fog, weather (rain / snow / storm / fog), volumetric god-rays, wet-floor reflection. — Atmosphere and weather

Tags and preset packs

Tag lights for filtering and bulk operations. Export a scene’s mood + weather as a JSON pack to share. — Tags and preset packs

Related

• Token vision — what each token can see (separate from scene lighting).
• Fog of war — explored vs unexplored areas, and how lights and tokens reveal them.