Skip to main content

Rooms Within Sets

A Room is a defined sub-area within a larger set. Real locations — a house, a hospital, a spaceship, an office building — contain multiple distinct spaces. By defining rooms within a set, you can assign scenes and shots to specific areas of the same location, maintain visual consistency, and move characters between rooms in a spatially coherent way.

What a Room Is​

A Room is a bounded section of a set with its own:

  • Name — "Kitchen", "Corridor", "Bridge", "Server Room"
  • Interior description — the visual character of the space
  • Lighting setup — rooms often have different lighting than adjacent areas
  • Props and furnishings — specific to that area
  • Spots — named positions within the room (see Set Spots)
  • Entry/exit points — connections to adjacent rooms

Why Rooms Matter​

Without room definitions, a set is a single undifferentiated space. When a script says "INT. CHEN HOUSE — KITCHEN — DAY" and later "INT. CHEN HOUSE — LIVING ROOM — DAY", both are in the same set but require different visual environments.

Rooms let you:

  • Assign different visual treatments to different areas of the same set
  • Move characters from room to room within a coherent spatial layout
  • Maintain consistent appearance for each room across every scene that visits it
  • Reference rooms by name in shot descriptions without re-describing the visual context

Defining Rooms in a Set​

  1. Open a set in the Top-Down View (editor → Sets → open set → Top-Down tab)
  2. Click Rooms in the toolbar
  3. Draw a room boundary on the set canvas:
    • Click to place boundary corners
    • Double-click to close the shape
  4. Name the room
  5. Add a room description: "Modern kitchen — white counters, stainless appliances, morning light from east-facing window"
  6. Configure the room's lighting (see Lighting for options)
  7. Add spots within the room for actor and camera placement
  8. Define entry/exit points — click on boundary edges and mark which sides connect to other rooms

Repeat for each distinct space in the set.

Assigning Scenes to Rooms​

Once rooms are defined, scenes can be assigned to a specific room:

  1. Open a Scene card in the editor
  2. In Scene Settings, under Location, select the parent set
  3. A Room dropdown appears — select the specific room for this scene
  4. All shots in this scene default to that room's visual context and lighting

When you assign a room, the set's general description is filtered down to just that room's environment — actors are placed within the room's defined area, and the camera operates within those boundaries.

Moving Characters Between Rooms​

To show a character moving from one room to another:

  1. In the first shot, the character is positioned at an exit point of Room A
  2. In the transition shot (corridor, doorway), the character moves through the connecting space
  3. In the arrival shot, the character enters at the entry point of Room B

Define corridor and hallway segments as their own rooms or as connecting paths between rooms. This produces spatially consistent transitions that feel like a real building.

Room Descriptions and North/South/Frame Direction​

When describing character and camera positions within a room, use:

  • Compass directions — North, South, East, West based on the room's orientation in the set canvas. In Top-Down View, North is the top of the canvas.

    • "Camera at the South wall, facing North toward the refrigerator"
    • "Actor standing at the East window"

  • Frame direction — Frame left, frame right, foreground, background based on the camera's perspective.

    • "The actor moves frame right as she approaches the counter"
    • "Subject is foreground right; background shows the door"

Both systems work in shot prompts and room spot descriptions. Most teams use compass directions for set planning and frame directions for camera-specific shot descriptions.

Room Library​

Frequently used room types can be saved to your Organization's Room Library:

  • Define the room once (name, description, lighting, spots)
  • Save it to the library
  • Apply it to any set in any project in one click

Standard room types — "modern office", "hospital room", "apartment living room", "server room" — can be reused across productions, saving design time on recurring location types.

Rooms and Visual Consistency​

Like set spots, rooms are saved as part of the set definition and persist across every scene that uses that set. If "Chen's Kitchen" appears in three scenes across the film, all three scenes reference the same room definition, ensuring:

  • Identical prop placement and furniture layout
  • Same lighting baseline (scene-level lighting adjustments layer on top)
  • Same spatial orientation for the camera

The audience perceives the kitchen as a single, real, consistent place — because it is defined once and never rebuilt.