If you are on the creative side, it’s hard to stay at home without any humans to shoot. If you are not familiar with Set.A.Light 3d, it’s a piece of software that creates realistic studio setups, including pretty realistic models. So if you are stuck at home, and can’t transform it into a studio, or if you have no one to shoot, this can be a perfect way to feed your creative needs.
When you start Set.a.Light, you select a room to set up. You can choose the room size to fit your actual space, or just go wild with the largest room available. Then you can chose a backdrop, some furniture and create a set.
From there, you can select between several models. I got to say, the models are not 100% human, but the amount of details is amazing for a computer render. The nice thing is that you can actually change quite a bit of aspects of every model. Some things are trivial like clothing and makeup. But you can also perfectly pose you models. You can select between several standing/poses, but the control goes down to the angle of each finger and foot. Once you have the model set, you can add lights. I was amazed by the selection of lights and modifiers that this software has to offer. They have come a long way from our initial review in 2015. They have all the regular modifiers, like softboxes, shoots and octas, but also some more units options like Lastolite Hilite, Spiffy Gear Light Blaster, and an entire collection of Arri lights. The LED section is still missing enough options to be a good cinema simulator, but it’s everything you could wish for as a still shooter. You can gel, flag and modify each of the lights. Lastly, you can position your camera and “shoot”. Well, at least shoot virtually. And this is where the magic happens. The software uses the same lighting engine like high-end games so the result is amazingly realistic lighting wise. You would get the same highlights, shadows, colors and fall offs as you would get with real lights. (sans the setup and breakdown hustle). Here are some examples showing how versatile the software is: Set.a.light does have a 15 days trial, so you can try the software before getting your ($229.90) license. They do have a sale running until the 15th for $154.00 if you want to jump right in tough. We asked the team to send us some pre-prepared files to play with and they sent us this project file which you can load into the demo copy and play with the sets above and some more. And if you are looking for some lighting lessons, you can follow The Lighting Series which is using the same engine to recreate real photos.
