Venue Builder manual · v1.5

What's new

What it does

Venue Builder builds a 3D venue from a handful of real measurements and exports it for prediction software: SketchUp (.skp) for Display 3, DXF for any CAD or predictor, ArrayCalc venue (.dbacv) and Soundvision 3D room data (.txt). Every surface is sorted into a coverage layer: Audience, Non-audience, Stage, Keep clear and Wall. You never draw in CAD. You describe the room the way you would measure it standing in it: a cross-section of laser shots, a few widths, and where the stage sits.

It also opens venue files made elsewhere — SketchUp, DXF, ArrayCalc venues and projects, Soundvision room data — so you can check their scale in 3D and export them in any of the other formats. See Opening other venue files.

Everything is live. Change a number and the section, the 3D room and the plan redraw immediately. Ctrl+Z undoes any change.

Video tutorial: Watch the walkthrough on YouTube — measuring a room, building it and exporting, start to finish.

The six steps

The pills across the top are the workflow. A pill lights up when its step is available; you can jump back to any earlier step at any time.

  1. Start. Three cards: draw your own section on the Section view, start from a demo venue and edit its numbers, or Convert a file made in another program (view and export only). Below them, Open a saved Venue Builder project brings a .venue file back editable, and Resume where you left off appears when this browser holds a draft of your last venue: the tool keeps one automatically as you work, so a closed tab does not lose the afternoon. A draft is not a file — Save when it matters. Starting a new one replaces what is on screen (Ctrl+Z brings it back).
  2. Venue type. How the section becomes a room, and where you stand to measure it: Flat field, Theater, Amphitheater or Arena. You can change type later without losing your section.
  3. Section. The measured cross-section, one row per vertex. This is the heart of the model; see Measuring a section.
  4. Venue. The few numbers the chosen type needs (widths, fan angle, floor size) plus that type's extras: side balconies for a theater, voms, retractable seating and a scoreboard for an arena, the outline editor for a footprint.
  5. Stage & walls. Stage size and position, the room's walls, and the stage house (back wall and side walls) that trims seating behind the stage.
  6. Export. Save the project, then export for Display 3, CAD, ArrayCalc or Soundvision.

Measuring a section

Stand where the type tells you: the Section view says so in its header, and the Draw banner spells it out before your first click (the stage edge, the downstage edge, or the edge of the arena floor). The plan marks the spot with a figure facing down the throw. Shoot the points that define the room's profile straight down the throw: the front of the first seats, each change of rake, the top of a riser, the front lip of a balcony, the back wall. Each shot is one row.

Venue types

Theater extras

Side balconies (Venue step) run each balcony in your section along both side walls toward the stage. The tool finds the balconies itself from the fold-backs and tells you what it found. You set how far toward the stage they reach, their width from the wall, and an optional rake that pitches them down toward the stage, hinged at the balcony.

Room (Stage & walls step): walls around the house — the back of the house, or the back plus both sides — with a height. Side walls can rise level with the back wall's top or follow the rake, and they duck under a balcony.

Arena extras

Vomitoria (Venue step): tunnel mouths cut into the bowl at floor level. Each vom has a side (the four straight sides, or the four rounded corners at 45°), an offset along that side, a width and a height. The open mouth runs from the floor edge up the bowl to where the rake reaches the vom's height; behind it the tunnel continues under the seats for the length you give, which defaults to the bowl depth. Drag a vom on the plan to slide it along its side.

Retractable seating (Venue step): shoot the section with the retractable seats rolled out, the usual show layout, so the lower part of the bowl you measured is the retractable seating. Tick Retractable seating and set Retractable depth, how far the retractable rows reach from the floor edge to the fixed seats. The plan then shows eight pieces: left side, right side, far end, behind the stage, and the four corners, each teal when out (exactly as measured) and amber when pushed back. Click a piece on the plan, or its lower seats in the 3D view, to switch it. A pushed-back piece loses those lower rows: the floor runs flat out to the stacked units, a Non-audience block against the fixed seats. Two pushed-back neighbours join; where one meets a piece that is out, the cut is closed with your section's shape. Behind the stage and its two corners start pushed back, since they usually go first, and while they are back the stage may move back to the stack (a stage still in its default spot moves with them).

Scoreboard: a box floating over the centre of the floor, with width, depth, height and clearance above the floor. It exports as Non-audience.

Smoothness is the number of faces around each rounded corner, in steps that each change the bowl.

Advanced (outlines)

Flat field and Amphitheater have an Advanced button on the Venue step. It turns the venue into a footprint whose outline you can pull around, keeping your section, stage and the exact heights the simple type produced. Use it for an asymmetric lawn or an odd field edge. Back to … (simple setup) returns to the numeric version.

The Venue step then has two sub-steps, so the plan only ever does one thing at a time:

Stage & walls

The stage is a box: one row for its size (width × depth × height, the way staging is written) and one for its offsets (left/right, front/back) from where you stood. In an arena it can sit anywhere on the flat floor. Seating in front of the stage line stays Audience; floor behind the line becomes Non-audience and the footprint under the stage is Stage.

The stage house: Back wall cuts away seating behind the stage and adds a wall of the given height and width, offset from the stage's back edge. Its width starts as, and follows, the stage width; type a different width and it stays yours. Side walls (needs the back wall) adds a wall each side of the stage at the stage's own width, from the back wall to the stage front, same height. Both are off in the round.

Views, plan & satellite

Look (top right, beside Units and Colors): System follows your computer's light or dark setting; Dark and Light force one. The views, legend and this manual follow. (The manual has no scripts, so it follows the system setting only.)

The 3D room always carries a scale bar (bottom left) and the venue's overall across × deep × high (bottom right), in your units. The legend uses Venue Builder's own names while you build; on the Export step it switches to the words your chosen format will use — Display 3 / DXF layer names, ArrayCalc listening · structure · transparent, or Soundvision group names. Hover a swatch for the mapping.

Export

Save the project first (.venue, a small text file you can reopen later). Then pick a Format; the choice is remembered.

Copy link puts the whole venue into a web address — nothing is uploaded, the venue is the link. Paste it to a colleague and it opens in their Venue Builder (on an iPad the link goes to the Share panel). An imported file cannot go in a link: save it instead.

The status bar along the bottom shows the room's numbers all the time: overall size, audience area, and the farthest and highest audience points measured from the front centre of the stage deck.

Opening other venue files

Start → Convert a file opens a SketchUp .skp, a DXF, an ArrayCalc venue .dbacv or project .dbpr, or a Soundvision .txt — a venue built somewhere else, or one you exported earlier. Pick the file and you land on the Export step with the 3D room filling the view. (A .venue project picked here simply opens as a project.)

An opened file is view and export only: a banner says so, and the Venue type, Section, Venue and Stage & walls steps stay locked, because a finished mesh has no rows or measurements to edit. What you can do:

What comes through: flat surfaces (SketchUp faces in groups and components, DXF 3DFACE, closed polylines, polyface meshes and circles, including everything inside block references, ArrayCalc planes, boxes and circular segments from venue or project files, Soundvision polygons). DXF sizes follow the file's unit header; a file without one is read in whichever unit makes it a plausible venue size, and the banner says so — check the extents. Lines, arcs and hidden geometry are not surfaces and are listed in the banner as not carried over. The Save button is off for an import — save the exported file instead. Opening an ArrayCalc .dbpr project loads a small database engine (about 0.7 MB) the first time, so it takes a moment longer.

On an iPad

Open the same address in Safari. Venue Builder sees the touch screen and switches to finger-sized controls; the tool itself is the same. Hold the iPad sideways: the layout is landscape only, and upright it asks you to turn it (a web page cannot lock rotation — Rotation Lock in Control Center keeps it there).

Phones are not supported: on a phone the page says so and links to muffstuff.net.

Shortcuts

Units (ft / m), Appearance and the colour-vision palette are in the header and apply everywhere, including the legend and the exported DXF's units. Leaving the page with unsaved work asks first.

Glossary

Rake
The slope of a seating surface, rising away from the stage.
Riser
A vertical step in the section, drawn as two vertices at the same distance.
Fold-back / soffit
A section segment that comes back toward the stage at height: the underside of a balcony. This is how the tool recognises a balcony.
Downstage / upstage
Toward the audience / away from it.
Throw
The direction from the stage into the house; distances "downrange" are along it.
Retractable seating
Telescopic seat units that roll out onto the floor or push back into a stack against the fixed seats.
Vomitorium (vom)
A tunnel entrance through the seating at floor level.
Keep clear
The strictest non-audience class: surfaces where sound is unwanted, not merely uncovered. The stage is one by default. Exported as the HARD_AVOID layer so predictors that know that class pick it up.
Listening plane · Structure · Obstacle
ArrayCalc's three plane types. Audience surfaces export as listening planes, the stage as a structure, everything else as transparent obstacles; the same words appear in the legend when ArrayCalc is the chosen format.
Group (Soundvision)
Soundvision collects imported surfaces by their label into groups: Audience, Stage, Avoid, KeepClear, Wall.
Scale bar
The bar under the 3D room: a known length in your units, exact anywhere on screen because the view has no perspective.