Venue size

The venue size sets the dimensions of your stage in meters. It determines the scale of the visualizer: how large the fixtures appear and what distances lie between them. The more accurate the size, the more realistic the layout.

📍 Where: visualizer“Venue” button in the top-left corner.

How to set it:

  1. Click “Venue” — the settings open.
  2. Enter the width and depth in meters by hand, or pick a ready-made preset:
Preset Size (W × D)
Club 8 × 6 m
Stage 12 × 8 m
Hall 15 × 10 m
Arena 20 × 15 m

The current size is always shown at the bottom of the 2D plan (for example, “12 × 8 m”).

Venue brightness. The same “Venue” window holds the “Venue brightness” slider. It lightens the hall itself — the floor, the grid markings, the trusses and the walls. Useful when the picture looks too dark: monitors differ, and the light in the room gets in the way in different measures.

  • 100 % is how it was originally. A click on the percentage next to the slider instantly returns 100 %.
  • Along with the venue, the trusses and the bodies of the fixtures come out too, including the ones that are switched off: on a dark stage an unlit fixture used to be almost invisible and hard to hit with the mouse.
  • The slider does not change the brightness of the light from the fixtures: beams, pools and colours stay the same, only the “scenery” around them gets lighter.
  • The setting is remembered for this computer and is not saved into the project — open somebody else’s file and you keep your own brightness.
💡 Tip: set the size at the very start, before laying out fixtures. Then you’ll move them around the plan at real scale and won’t have to redo everything if you change the dimensions later.
💡 Tip: don’t know the exact figures? Take the nearest preset. For most jobs that’s enough, and you can refine it at any moment.

Room height

Next to width and depth you set the Room height — from 2 to 30 metres, 5 by default. Three things depend on it:

  • how tall the walls are drawn;
  • how high fixtures mounted on the ceiling hang — they drop 0.8 m below the ceiling (hook, bar and body). In a 5 m room that is the familiar 4.2 m; in a 3 m room, 2.2 m;
  • whether a beam aimed upwards has anything to hit: in a closed room it leaves a pool on the ceiling.
💡 The ceiling and the walls appear only when Show walls is ticked: at an open-air site a beam aimed up has to go into the sky rather than stop at an invisible plane.
⚠️ Projects saved earlier had no room height in them — the old 5 metres apply there, and the picture does not change.

A ready-made venue in one click

At the top of the Venue window there are four buttons: Club, Bar, Wedding hall, Open-air. One press and the hall is set up whole:

  • the size and the height of the room are set, the walls are turned on (or off, for an open-air site);
  • a stage stands by the back wall with a truss over its downstage edge, and in a large hall a second truss over the audience;
  • speakers are placed at the sides of the stage, plus a DJ booth, an LED screen (in the club and open-air presets) and two audience areas.

It is a starting point, not a fixed scheme: from there move and edit any item with the mouse as usual. Made a mistake? Ctrl+Z brings the previous venue back whole, in a single step.

⚠️ Fixtures that hung on the previous trusses keep their places on the plan, but they come off the new trusses: the old structures no longer exist. Hang them again with a right-click → pick a truss.
Fig. 08.04.1 — Venue size settings with presets
Fig. 08.04.1 — Venue size settings with presets