Design complete scenes with sunlight and create natural-light locations — outdoor and indoor. Build far into the distance with wide, detailed outdoor environments featuring ready-made or custom-imported assets.

A. Sunlight

Add real sunlight to your scenes, position it freely, and shape it just like any other light source. From low golden-hour glow to harsh midday sun, you control the angle, height, and mood of the light.

B. Mixed Lighting — Sun + Strobe

Combine the sun with strobes or continuous lights and decide which plays the primary role: sun as key with flash fill, or strobe as key with the sun as rim or ambient. Indoors, you can also use sunlight through windows as a natural key (base light) and build your artificial lights around it.

C. Natural Light Feature Set

1 — Compass

The sun compass gives you a quick overview of the four cardinal directions and shows exactly from which side the sunlight is hitting your set. By grabbing and rotating the disc, you can intuitively spin the sun around your scene and immediately see how the light direction changes.

2 — North

Lets you align the whole scene with the real world by rotating where North sits in relation to your set.

3 — Sun

Fine-tune the sunlight itself — switching it on or off, and setting its intensity, diffusion, direction, and height in the sky.

4 — Fog

Add adjustable haze to your scene, allowing you to create depth, atmosphere, and visible light beams.

5 — Background

Control the sky look and HDRI preset, including the scene's overall color temperature, brightness, and view encompassing your set.

6 — Location & Time

Pick any place on Earth, set a specific date and time, and let the app calculate the absolute sun position for you. This way, your virtual sunlight matches the actual conditions on location — perfect for planning specific outdoor shoots or window-light sessions.

Discover Community Setups

Your playground to explore ideas, plan your next shoot, and refine any look — outdoors, indoors, and everywhere in between.

Golden Hour Blend

by Dan Hostettler

A crisp strobe (key light) sculpts the face and upper body while the low sun paints a warm rim and glowing background, fusing studio clarity with cinematic sunset atmosphere.

Set ID 11045817 ›

Noon Tamed

by Dan Hostettler

Harsh high-noon sun becomes a soft, flattering key light through the scrim, while a strobe adds a semi-soft edge light, keeping the portrait bright and polished without deep shadows.

Set ID 11045818 ›

Doorway Balance

by Dan Hostettler

The sun serves as the bold key light from outside, while a strobe fills the face, and an indoor background strobe lifts the room, balancing blazing exterior light with crisp interior detail.

Set ID 11045819 ›

Sunset Window Glow

by Dan Hostettler

Low sunset sun streams through the pane grid as the dominant key light, carving warm patterns across the subject, while a soft strobe light keeps skin tones clean without losing the amber ambience.

Set ID 11045820 ›

Rooftop

by Kuba Machnikowski

A low, hazy sun cuts through the cityscape, casting graphic shadows and a sharp rim around the subject, transforming the industrial rooftop into a high-contrast, cinematic tableau.

Set ID 11045641 ›

Fotoset

by Thomas Ulrich

A single hard light from camera right shapes the subject, while the overcast sky provides broad ambient fill; background practicals add depth to the scene without lighting the foreground figure.

Set ID 11045704 ›

Loft

by Kuba Machnikowski

Hard sunlight streams through the loft windows, creating crisp, slatted patterns, with a light haze revealing the beams. The ARRI unit (left) serves only as set dressing for mood.

Set ID 11045665 ›

Have fun trying it out,
Dan from elixxier


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Visit our website for more information and try our free trial. set.a.light 3D is available for Mac and Windows.

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