How to shoot a room that isn't real

Rooms

A picture grid at the top of the left column — this is which built environment you're shooting in. Each one is its own separate build: three sizes of the datacenter hall (large/medium/small — one scene, different rack counts), the safety-deposit vault, the gold and cash vaults, the Startup Loft and Innovation Hub offices, the Rooftop Terrace office, and the Countryside, Cliffside and Mountain villas plus the NYC Penthouse. Click a thumbnail and everything else on the page — the angle presets, the shot library, the live preview — updates to that room. More rooms get added to this list over time; if a room you've seen in the public catalog isn't showing up here yet, it hasn't been wired into Compose yet.

Camera & angle

This is the actual camera. Angle is a dropdown of pre-placed positions per room — Hero (a wide shot down the main space), Low angle (looking up), a close detail/macro angle, a Corner overview, a Top-down map view, or Custom, where you type in an X/Y/Z position and an X/Y/Z look-at point yourself in metres.

Camera body is a shortcut, not a real camera: pick "Cinema — RED-inspired" or similar and it sets a starting lens/white-balance/look evocative of that body's typical rendering. It isn't a literal color-science match to a real RED or Alexa, and every slider it sets stays fully editable afterward.

Below that are the two settings a photographer will recognize immediately: lens (14–200mm) and aperture (f/1.4–16, lower = shallower focus and more background blur).

Lighting & colour

Exposure and white balance sliders, plus a Look dropdown — five AgX tone-mapping presets from flat/base up to punchy/high-contrast, the same kind of choice a colorist makes in a grading suite.

Underneath that is the important part: a list of the room's actual light fixtures, each with its own on/off switch — ceiling troffers, containment-strip LEDs, exit signs, status displays, screens, emergency lighting. These aren't filters laid over the image afterward. Each one is a real light in the scene, so switching it off actually removes that light source from the render, shadows and all.

Camera movement (video only)

Only matters if Output type (below) is set to Video. Move is the camera path: push-in, pull-out, a left/right slider, an orbit or short arc around the subject, a boom-arc (crane plus arc together), crane up/down, a tripod pan or tilt, an aisle fly-through, an FPV-style drone weave, a dolly-zoom ("vertigo") effect, or a reveal (pull back and rise). Duration is a slider from 3 to 15 seconds in the dashboard itself — contributor platforms generally want clips a bit longer than that for a standard single-play shot (roughly 10–20 seconds is the commonly cited sweet spot), so for a real delivery you'll usually want to push the slider toward its top end rather than leave it at the low default.

Shot library (middle column)

A list of shots someone has already composed and named for the current room — you don't have to build every shot from scratch. Filter by Stills or Video, filter by whether a preview image already exists for that shot, and sort by library order, name, or group. Click any entry to load its exact camera, lighting and movement settings into the controls on the left, then render it as-is or nudge it first.

Output & render settings (the gear button)

This popup is where you decide what actually gets written to disk:

Type

Still image or video clip.

Resolution

For stills: 8K (7680×4320) down to 5K, 4K, 1080p, 720p, 480p. For video: 4K down through smaller sizes. Higher resolution takes longer to render.

Orientation

Horizontal, Vertical (swaps width and height — 4K vertical is 2160×3840), or Super Wide 2.39:1 (a real anamorphic/"scope" cinema ratio, not just a 16:9 crop).

Quality

Preview (fast, low-sample, CPU-only thumbnails), Draft, Balanced, or Final (full quality, for an actual sellable master). Each step trades render speed for a cleaner, less noisy image.

Smart render

On by default. Culls geometry that's outside the frame or too far out of focus to matter — a lossless speed-up, not a quality trade-off.

Loop (video)

Also encodes a second file that plays the same clip forward then backward — a perfect seamless boomerang loop, no extra render time.

Save to folder

Where Blender writes the file. Leave it blank and it goes to renders/shots by default.

Once everything looks right in the live preview on the right, Render / add to queue is the button that actually starts the job.

On this PC

Shows this machine's own GPU telemetry, any background render process currently working, a live progress bar and log for the job in front, and the queue behind it. Render this shot renders just the current one; Queue whole library lines up every shot in the room's library at once; Clear finished tidies completed jobs out of the list. Below the queue, a Not yet rendered panel lists library shots that don't have a finished file yet for the exact resolution/quality combination you're asking for — useful for spotting gaps before you queue a whole room.

Render farm — getting help from another machine

If a render is going to take a while, another computer — your own laptop, or a friend's machine — can help by joining the farm. One command joins a Mac, Windows PC or Linux box: it fetches Blender and this project's scene scripts on its own. There's nothing to install by hand first, and no Blender purchase or license needed — Blender itself is free, and the join script downloads it automatically on the joining machine.

On the same local network as the studio PC, the bare command already works — no token, no extra setup:

curl -sL <bridge-address>/farm/join-mac.sh | bash

iwr <bridge-address>/farm/join-windows.ps1 -useb | iex

curl -sL <bridge-address>/farm/join-linux.sh | bash

The Render Queue tab's own farm panel fills in the real address for you — you don't need to type or guess it; the versions above are just the shape of the command.

For a friend who isn't on the same network: they need a private invite link (dc336.dotshock.ai/#join=<token>) — ask the host for one. The token travels only in that link's URL fragment, never in the page's own source, so it can't leak just from someone viewing the page. Once they open that exact link, the same farm panel shows their real working command with the token already filled in.

The Outputs tab is a gallery of everything this PC has actually rendered, with an Open folder button that jumps straight to the real folder on disk. Nothing shown here is a placeholder or a preview — it's the delivered file.