Last night I pushed Studio 5, the Set Builder, live. Probably faster than I should have. Was that completely sensible? Maybe not. But that’s also very much who I am. Not always completely sensible.
The main reason it might have been smarter to wait is that Studio 5 is still very much in beta. There will be things that don’t work perfectly yet. There will be things I’ve overlooked. And there will probably be situations I simply haven’t tested, because somewhere along the way this turned into a ridiculously large project.
But I kept coming back to the same question. What’s the alternative? Keep building it privately for another one, two or three months while there’s already a version people can actually use? That started to make less and less sense to me.
Especially because Lumen Tool runs entirely in your browser. I’d approach this very differently if Studio 5 were software you had to download and install, where every update had to be distributed separately and bugs could mess with your files, system settings or other parts of your computer. That’s not what this is.
It runs in a browser tab. If something goes badly wrong, the most realistic consequence is that the page freezes and you reload it. I haven’t even managed to make that happen myself yet, and believe me, I’ve tried. But this is beta software, so I’m not promising nobody ever will.
So I put it live. And considering this started as a completely unplanned side project, I think it has become something really, really good.
How this even started
As I mentioned before, it started while I was writing my comparison of Lumen Tool and set.a.light 3D. Somewhere along the way I started wondering what it would be like to build a proper 3D photography studio inside Lumen Tool.
A place where you could put down a model, position lights around them, change modifiers, move the camera and basically build a shoot before you ever step into a real studio.
This was not on the roadmap. At all. But apparently I can’t leave ideas alone once they get into my head. So I started building it.
It very quickly became clear that this was going to be much heavier and more complicated than the original Lighting Simulator. Some of the basic principles are similar. You have a subject. You have light. You move things around and see what happens. But Studio 5 piles an enormous number of variables on top of that.
What’s already in Studio 5
Right now you can already do all of this:
| What's in it | What you can do |
|---|---|
| Move around freely | Build a complete 3D studio setup and walk around it. |
| Around eleven people | Place, reposition and rotate realistic 3D people, with more planned. |
| Full body control | On one of the models, adjust the body and pose much more extensively. |
| Multiple studio lights | Use different power levels, move lights closer or farther away and change their intensity. |
| A large collection | Softboxes, stripboxes, octaboxes, umbrellas, beauty dishes, a lantern, snoot, projector and more. |
| White, silver, gold, black | Add reflector surfaces, including V-flats. |
| Different environments | Work inside different studio spaces. |
| 3D, camera and monitor | Build in the 3D overview, see the scene from the photographer's position and keep a camera monitor open alongside it. |
| Aperture, focal length | Change the camera settings and see what the shot does. |
| Save as you go | Keep different versions of a setup while you work. |
| Finished setups | Save the setups you're happy with to The Archive. |
| PDF lighting plan | Create a printable PDF of a setup so you can take the lighting plan with you. |
And this is still the first public beta.
The people inside Studio 5
For now, most of the 3D models are ones I’ve sourced online that are officially available for this kind of use. That was a very deliberate choice. I didn’t want to spend a pile of money on premium 3D people while the system underneath was still changing every day. Once I’m happy with the foundation, I definitely want to expand this with higher-end paid models as well.
Animation is another area I want to take much further. At the moment, one model has much deeper posing controls, where individual parts of the body can be adjusted. For Studio 5 to really grow into a mature tool, I eventually want several models with that level of control. That’s also one of those things that sounds a lot smaller when you write it down than when you actually start building it.
About the lights
The lights inside Studio 5 are calibrated relative to each other.
So if you put a 150 watt light next to a 300 watt light, there’s a meaningful difference. The same goes for changing distance, using a larger softbox, adding a beauty dish or changing the way the light is shaped. The overall light output, spread and falloff behave in a way that makes the tool useful for planning and understanding a setup.
What Studio 5 does not have yet are official profiles for individual real-world lights. So you can’t currently say: I own this exact Godox, Aputure or Profoto light, select that exact model inside Studio 5 and have it reproduce the manufacturer’s measured output perfectly. That’s something I really want to add later.
The proper way to do it would be to work from manufacturer photometric data, such as measured lux at specific distances, beam angle and the way output changes with particular reflectors or modifiers. And I don’t want to fake that. If I add real products, I want to do it properly.
Eventually I’d love for someone to be able to say, “I have this exact 300 watt light in my studio,” select it in the Set Builder and get something that corresponds closely to the real thing.
But building a proper library like that is a project on its own. It’s not something I’m going to throw together in two days just so I can say the feature exists. For now, the generic lights already work really well. And visually, I’m very happy with what it’s already doing.
The difficult part: reflectors
One thing that’s still giving me a headache is reflectors. Especially white and black V-flats.
A white V-flat should bounce light back towards the subject. A black V-flat does the opposite and is normally used as negative fill, reducing unwanted bounce and making the shadow side darker.
Getting that to feel natural inside a real-time, browser-based 3D tool is a lot harder than just dropping another light into the scene.
They’re in Studio 5 already, and I’m leaving them there because they’re useful. But do I think they react perfectly in every situation yet? No. That needs more work. Again, beta.
And then I want to make it much bigger
I also want far more objects inside the studio. Furniture, tables, chairs, backgrounds, props and all kinds of other things, so that eventually a lighting setup can grow into an entire room built around the shot.
There will also be more spaces. Different photography studios, larger rooms, industrial spaces, maybe a hangar. There’s a huge amount I can still do here.
Eventually I’d even like to add a completely empty buildable space where you create the room itself. Walls, dimensions, layout. Basically a very simplified Sims-style way of constructing your own shooting space before you fill it. Minus the swimming pool without a ladder. That’s on the list. But I also know myself well enough to say this is probably not something I’m finishing in the next few weeks. Or possibly even the next few months.
Studio 5 is going to be an ongoing project. And I really like that.
This could almost become a website of its own if I let it. But I also have to remember it’s only one of many studios inside Lumen Tool. So this is something I can keep coming back to. If I have an hour and feel like working on it, I can add something. Improve a light. Add a model. Build another room. Fix something that annoys me. It shouldn’t stop me from working on everything else I have planned for Lumen Tool.
That’s probably the biggest difference between Studio 5 and the original Lighting Simulator. The Lighting Simulator is a fairly finished tool. It might get an update now and then, but the foundation is there and I don’t expect it to fundamentally change every month.
The Set Builder is different. I think this one will just keep moving. More models. More lights. More modifiers. More rooms. More objects. Better posing. Better reflections. Better camera tools. It’s probably never going to feel completely “finished”, because there will always be something else I can add. And that’s kind of the point.
It’s already included in Lumen Tool
Studio 5 is available now inside the Lumen Tool Member Area. There’s no separate purchase and no extra fee for using it. Everything is still included in the same membership, which at the moment is €9 or $9 per month.
That will probably go up at some point as Lumen Tool keeps growing, but while everything is still this early, I’m keeping it where it is.
Mostly, I’m now very curious to see what people actually do with Studio 5. Because after spending this long building and testing something yourself, there comes a point where you need other people to start touching it. And breaking it. Preferably only a little.
Then it’s on to the next studio. I’ve already started playing with the foundations of what will probably become a Product Lighting Studio. There’s no release date. There’s no fixed schedule. It’ll be ready when it’s ready. But it’s coming.
As always, thanks for reading, and have fun with the tools.