A truss is the structure your fixtures hang from. The program used to draw a single truss by itself: right across the hall and always at the same height. Now you place the trusses yourself — as many as you need, each with its own length, height and angle.
How to place a truss — roughly the way objects are dropped around a site in a game:
- Press Objects — a narrow palette appears on the left.
- Choose what you are placing: Truss on legs (a span with two legs down to the floor), Flown beam (hung, without legs), Stage (riser) or a piece of staging — DJ booth, speaker stack, LED screen, audience area.
- Move the mouse across the plan — a translucent outline of the future truss follows the cursor. Green means “it fits here”, red means “outside the venue”.
- Click — the truss is in place. The tool stays in your hand, so the next click places another one.
- Esc — leave placement mode.
How to edit one already placed:
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Select | Click the truss on the plan |
| Move | Drag it with the mouse |
| Rotate | Mouse wheel or the R key — 15° steps. Shift+R turns the other way |
| Exact sizes | The property bar at the bottom of the visualizer panel: length and rigging height for a truss, width, depth and deck height for a stage; rotation in degrees for everything |
| Delete | The Del key |
Rigging height is the height at which the fixtures of this truss hang; the lattice itself is drawn slightly higher, as in real life where a fixture is clamped under the chord. A typical club height is 3–4 metres.
How to hang a fixture on a truss. Right-click the fixture on the plan → pick the truss you need from the list. After that:
- the fixture takes the height of the truss: raise the truss and all of its fixtures rise with it;
- the fixture travels with the truss: move or rotate the truss and its fixtures keep their places along the span;
- if you drag such a fixture with the mouse, it slides along the truss instead of coming off it;
- beams are calculated from the new height straight away — both in the 3D view and in point-aiming.
What happens to older projects. Nothing changes: if a project was saved before this feature appeared, the program puts the familiar truss across the whole hall at the old height into it. Want a different rig? Move it, resize it, or delete it and place your own.
Stage riser
The platform the performers stand on — an ordinary stage riser, 20–100 cm high. It is placed just like a truss: pick it from the palette, click the plan, set the sizes.
The stage is not merely drawn — it genuinely changes the picture:
- beams land on the deck instead of dropping through to the floor of the hall: the pool ends up where it would end up in real life, and the beam cone becomes shorter;
- fixtures standing on the stage rise with it — both floor fixtures and those on stands; a stand grows from the deck, not from the floor;
- point-aiming measures the distance to the deck, so a fixture aims at the performer rather than “through” the platform.
Set the sizes as in real life: width runs across the hall, depth from the audience to the backdrop. Rotation is handy for corner stages. The default deck height is 0.6 m.
Venue staging
Besides trusses and the stage, four pieces of staging can be placed on the plan:
| Item | What it is |
|---|---|
| DJ booth | A DJ table with a glowing console panel |
| Speaker stack | A tower of speaker cabinets; the height sets how many there are in the stack |
| LED screen | A backdrop with a glowing panel — the panel colour is chosen next to the sizes |
| Audience | An area that fills with human silhouettes |
The audience area is the most useful item for judging the picture: it shows the scale of the hall at a glance and where you had better not shine a beam into faces. The crowd is not “reshuffled” on every edit: the arrangement of people is always the same for that area.
