Frequently Asked Questions
Patreon
Absolutely ! Once you pledge at any of our tiers, you’ll have access to a Master Post on Patreon containing links for all of our up-to-date assets. You can check the added benefits of each tier from this section of our Website or directly on the Patreon page
You don’t have to join necessarily but you would miss out on a great community of people that are more than happy to share their way of using our assets and how they setup their game in general. This is also where you can ask for help or if you have a question about any module that can leverage our assets. Plus, the search feature of Discord can work wonders !
You can join here. Nothing prevents you to leave if you’re not finding it to your taste.
We have renamed it recently to Per Release as we will never release just one asset, as the Per Creation name suggests.
The maximum amount pledged is there for you to decide how much money you would be willing to give us at most per month.
See the Patreon – Per release section or the Patreon Documentation on this.
Well … people at this tier still come and go. It’s not like it’s forever locked !
Patreon is a platform that helps us continue what we love doing, which is creating animated assets. We now provide more than 2 GB worth of assets to anyone pledging to one of our tiers and provide a free module that we also update every release. The Patreon pack mostly includes variations of colors, weapon models…etc
We started a year ago and we liked the idea of including a 1€ tier as it allowed for anyone to contribute. We kept it instead of getting rid of it entirely. Not many other Patreon creators do have such a low entry tier. And if you compare this with the price of some packs on the Roll20 marketplace for example, we are extremely accessible. Also, there is a maximum pledge amount you can set so that you’d only pay the pledged amount once per month at most and still get the updates. You could also pledge for a month, get the pack and leave. You’d keep the assets, you just wouldn’t get the updates.
Content
The original plan was to make all of the DnD5e SRD spells. This evolved for multiple reasons. Creating a spell effect takes time and more generic animations can be used for any system.
The community seems to enjoy everything we do ! Environmental tiles, explosions, laser shots, weapon attacks…
So we’re not limiting ourselves, we create and our community will steer us in the right direction if we stray too far !
That said, we’d love to end-up having at least one animation per spell and it’s still in the back of our mind.
As long as the webm video format is accepted, you’ll be able to play any of them on your scene. Some of the animations are meant to be continuously looping in your scene for environmental effects like the fireflies, butterflies, campfire and smoke, portals …
However some animations only play once like weapon attacks and explosions for example.
This is where it gets a little more complicated.
Your VTT of choice might not have planned for this as some kind of code or UI must come into play as to know where the animation is starting, the direction it needs to point to or have the position of the target.
If you know of a way to make our animations work in your tabletop, please notify us in Patreon or Discord so we can inform other folks about it !
We have created a few animated tokens like Arcane hand, Spiritual weapons, flaming sphere, dancing lights for example.
However we’re not planning on making animated creatures and characters. We’re not very good at it and there are already a few people doing this pretty well !
Have a look at Beneos Patreon for this as they create animated tokens every week !
No, unfortunately. We’re not always rendering image sequences for our animations and even if we did, the library would become unreasonably large ! We use the webm format because it allows for transparency and very small video size !
We mainly use Blender, After Effects and Unreal Engine.
Our library Asset Library Preview page gives a good overview of almost all the assets we provide. We only included the 30ft range for ranged attacks for example but you’ll get a good idea of what they look like !
All our assets are available for download on our Patreon Master Post. There, you’ll have access to our manifest link for FoundryVTT users or the direct download link if you are on another VTT.
You need a patreon account and a subscription to one of our tier to unlock this post.
FoundryVTT
There are many, many ways to use our assets in FoundryVTT. With no extra modules installed, it will be pretty much limited to tiles and tokens.
Some animations will be better suited to being tokens, like the Spiritual Weapons, Flaming Spheres… which are supposed to be moving independently. For DnD5e, we provide a compendium of actors for those but you can create your own in any system by changin the prototype token’s image.
It won’t work for portraits as FoundryVTT does not support webm for those and only accept static images formats such as PNG and Webp.
You can distribute some animations on a map as Tiles, just to give it some extra movement and life.
The fireflies, flames and smokes, eyes in the dark, water splash are all good candidates to add some interest in your scene, but you’d be surprised at how creative some people get with our assets! Using the token borders or magic signs to embellish a landing page and so much more!
Now, modules such as Sequencer and Automated Animations take things to the next level.
- Sequencer requires a little bit of javascript knowledge but you can do a LOT with it.
The wiki on the module’s Github is very well documented and even has a tutorial section for beginners. We highly recommend it! - Automated Animations (often referred to as A-A) uses Sequencer as a dependency. It will be a little less flexible than creating your own macro or script but you can configure an animation for each spell/Item/Feature in the Automatic-Recognition menu (in A-A’s settings) and the animation will be triggered when the item is rolled to chat. In the Auto-Rec menu, there are 6 different tabs:
- Melee : Animation moves towards the target
- Ranged : Animation stretches towards the target
- On Token : Animation is on the token or/and on the target
- Template : Animation is in the template
- Preset : Anything that doesn’t fit the above
- Active Effect On Token : Animation that is enabled on adding an Active Effect to token
- Automated Animations play when there is
- a Template
- an attack roll or damage roll (and a token targeted)
- and then only when a spell has literally nothing to roll or place down, it plays the animation by just putting it in chat.
You can find all intructions needed, here.
You can find all intructions needed, here.
Not necessarily, although it is a fantastic module, especially if you’re just starting or you don’t know or want anything to do with coding !
You may have noticed that Automated Animations has a dependency to a module called Sequencer.
If you want to achieve something that is outside the scope of A-A, we recommend having a look at the Sequencer wiki. It’s a great ressource to learn, from beginner to advanced on how to write a macro that makes use of our animated assets.
Also, Sequencer has now a new player feature for dragging and dropping animations on the canvas with a strong search feature and you can even save your own presets !
No, we are not affiliated to Automated Animations or Otigon, its creator.
Otigon is one of our first patron who supported us since the beginning and was very enthusistic about creating macros to use our assets more efficiently, especially for instantaneous effects. He ended up creating his own module !
The development of Automated Animations is taking a lot of his free time so please keep that in mind and be extra patient and respectful towards him.
Consider even thanking him and supporting him on his Patreon page
We are very grateful for all his work. It opened up access to our assets for a lot of people !
The number of assets (colour and/or animation variations) and a few benefits you get from the pledged tier, like Discord roles that unlock access to different channels like the #sneak-peek or the #request channel.
A preview is available on our website for most of our assets and shows you which colour or variation is available in our Patreon collection compared to the free one.
Unfortunately, this gets slightly complicated.
When updating a module on FoundryVTT, everything gets re-downloaded. You may not have noticed it on other modules as their size is relatively very small compared to ours containing a lot of video files.
The alternative that we propose and provide in our Master Post is a Zip file called ‘Only New Stuff” which contains only the new assets from the latest release.
So, as long as you have the previous release, you can download this zip file, extract it and move it in your modules folder, overwriting any existing files and you’re good to go !
We have a section on our website on How to use our assets in FoundryVTT which explains a few ways via ‘core’ functions or extra modules you can experiment with.
Feel free to direct any question you may have to our Discord server which is open to everyone !