I'm making HOT SET, a cinematography sim where the light is real

It’s a setup I know well. A small room, one practical hanging over a table, someone sitting under it. Then you put a key on the face, check the monitor, and the shadow side is filled in because that practical is lighting everything in the room.

The fix is a flag. Knowing that fast comes from reps, and you don’t get many reps on a paid day. That’s why I’m making HOT SET, a cinematography sim where the light is real.

What it actually does

You start with a brief and an empty set. The first one is an interrogation room: a medium close up of the Suspect, low key, at least 4:1 key to fill, no more than four lights. The only light on at the start is the practical over the table.

Everything comes out of the gear cage. Gear won’t go where it physically can’t, and the stands stop where the real ones do. The C stand tops out at 321 cm, not a centimeter more. Flags need a grip head and lights need a baby pin, the same as the real kit.

The lights behave like their specs. A Fresnel at 50° flood spreads its energy out and drops. Spot it to 15° and the same energy gathers into a tight, hot pool. A bicolor panel runs from 3200K to 5600K. A full color panel loses output the way a real one does: full red is 21% of white, green 72%, blue 7%. Roll a half diffusion frame in close to the face and the shadow softens without going away, and the face drops 1.3 stops.

There’s a light meter too. My first three point setup in the game was badly overexposed, so I metered it properly: 450 lux key, 150 lux fill. That’s a real 3:1.

The camera runs real exposure maths: stop, shutter, ISO and ND. T2.8 to T5.6 is two stops, a quarter of the light on the sensor. Each body has its own menus and readouts. The cinema body says 180° and T4, the mirrorless says 1/48 and f4, for the same exposure. Depth of field comes from the real focal length, stop and distance, so at 200mm on a 70 to 200 zoom there isn’t much of it.

Look down and the set turns into a lighting diagram: every light, where it points, how hard it’s working.

Then house lights out, roll, cut, and the game grades the take. In that interrogation room my first take failed at 2:1, because the practical was filling the shadow side of the face. A cutter on a C stand arm under the lamp, out of frame, takes 99% of the lamp’s light off the face, and that got me closer. Moving the key around to the side passed at 88.4 out of 100. Every take comes back with the three things that cost the most points.

It also grades each face against its own correct exposure. Darker skin sits lower on the scale than lighter skin, and that’s right, not underexposed. Nobody gets marked down for their skin.

What’s not in it yet

The actors are placeholder mannequins for now. Real faces aren’t in the game yet, so a trick like lighting from below, which depends on a nose and a brow to read, doesn’t land properly yet.

It’s still in development, and the Steam page isn’t open yet.

Get the Steam link

If you want to know the day it opens, leave your email at https://www.ritualmediapro.com/hotset. You get one email the day HOT SET’s Steam page goes up, with the link to wishlist it. Nothing else.