Work without a room (outdoor scenes)

Not every shot happens between four walls. With no room in the way the light comes from the environment — the sun and the environment map — instead of bouncing off a ceiling. That is the setting for location portraits, car shots, architecture, or a background that is not a paper sweep. By the end of this page you can start an outdoor project, lay a ground and build a location the camera believes.

Applies to BASIC, STUDIO, CINEMA · You need: the start dialog, or a project open on the SETUP tab.

Where to find it

Start a new project and pick the Outdoor card: Start outdoors. You can adjust the scene later on. The scene opens without a room, so the environment lights the set from the first frame. The other card, Indoor, opens inside a room.

An existing indoor project gets there too: delete the room, or hide it with the eye button in the set list. Both work, because sun and sky are only switched off while the camera stands inside a visible room that has no visible opening.

Where the light comes from outdoors

Select Environment — the first row of the set list — and the whole daylight rig is in one inspector:

• The sun, in the Sun group: Sun Direction (0°–360°) and Sun Altitude (−90°–90°, default 70°), with Brightness and Diffusion for how hard the shadows are. See Light a set with the sun.
• The environment map: eight ship. It is the sky, the surroundings and everything that turns up in a reflection; you can rotate it and change its Brightness in EV. See Use an HDRI environment.
• Fog Density (0–0.5, default 0) for depth and visible beams. See Fog and atmosphere.

Your flash and continuous heads work exactly as they do indoors — they are fighting a much larger source.

How to lay the ground

Outdoor sets stand on a Floor: a flat ground plane in the ASSETS tab under the Outdoor tag, 50 × 50 m as it arrives and adjustable from 0.1 m to 1000 m per side.

1. Drag the Floor into the scene, then open Material and pick a surface. Forty are available — asphalt, carpet, cobblestone, concrete, grass, marble, stone, tiles and wood — and the list opens with No Texture for a plain colour. → Picking one also writes its own Color and Shine, so choose the material first and fine-tune afterwards.
2. Set Scale (0.4–2.5) so the pattern reads at the right size for the framing, and Color to tint it.
3. Under Shape, set Width and Height of the plane and its Thickness (0–0.2 m), which gives the ground a visible edge where it ends.

Shine (default 0.24) is the control that decides whether the ground looks dry or wet. A bare plane under an environment map mirrors the sky, so a high value lifts the whole frame:

Floor

Setting	Range	Default	Unit	Animatable
Color		white		yes
Scale	0.4 – 2.5	1		no
Shine	0 – 1	0.24		yes
Thickness	0 – 0.2	0	m	no
Width / Height	0.1 – 1000	depends on the room	m	no

How to build the location

Everything else is a prop. The Outdoor tag holds 70 tiles — houses, apartment blocks and skyscrapers, streets and crossroads, brick walls with openings, fences, safety rails, barricades, scaffolds, benches, bins, traffic lights and cones, a playground — and the Plants tag adds 21 trees, palms, shrubs and pots.

Two rules of thumb:

• Build only what the camera sees. One house front and two trees carry a portrait; a whole city block costs render time for nothing.
• Place the tall pieces first. Buildings and walls decide where the sun is blocked and where the fill comes from, so they are lighting instruments as much as scenery.

A Wall Element works outdoors as well, and a window or a door from Doors & Windows snaps onto a free-standing wall element exactly as it does onto a room wall. That is how you shoot through a window front without putting a room around the set — see Build a room, a background and a window.

A worked example: a car at the kerb

You want an evening three-quarter shot of a car outside a house. Start from the Outdoor card. Lay a Floor, set its material to cobblestone and Shine to about 0.3 so the stones hold a sheen. Take Sun Altitude down to 10° and turn Sun Direction until the light rakes along the street. Put one house front and one tree on the sun side only — they are what makes the shadow on the car read. Then add a single large source from the camera side to open up the near flank, and check the exposure again: the wet-looking ground has started bouncing light back up into the wheel arches.

Tips & limits

• Meter the sun first. Set the sun and the environment brightness, then add your own heads against them — the same order you would work in on location.
• Reflections come from the environment map, not from geometry you cannot see. If a car or a glossy prop looks wrong, rotate the map instead of moving the object.
• Raising Fog Density adds depth to a wide exterior but also lifts the shadows. Check the exposure again afterwards.
• A ground plane is not endless. If the horizon shows a hard edge, make the plane larger rather than moving the camera.

Troubleshooting

• Everything went dark when I added a room. The camera is now inside a closed room. Cut an opening into a wall, hide the room, or move the camera outside it.
• My ground colour reset itself. Choosing a material applies that material’s own colour and shine. Pick the material first.
• The ground is far brighter than the subject. It is mirroring the sky. Lower Shine or take a matte material.

More symptoms: Objects, rooms and measurement problems

Related

• Build a room, a background and a window
• Find and place things from the library
• Light a set with the sun
• Use an HDRI environment
• Fog and atmosphere
• Plan an outdoor shoot with real sunlight