Web acoustic simulator
for real venues.

Fast Venue is a concept

From the idea to the final report in minutes — enjoying the process along the way.

Most acoustic tools make you fight the software before you ever see a result. Fast Venue flips that. It feels light and immediate: you load or draw a venue, drop speakers and audience areas, press one button, and the sound pressure level paints itself across every seat.

But that lightness is a surface. Underneath sits real science — per-speaker polar data, distance attenuation, phasor and power summation across frequency bands (1/3 oct, octave, dBA, dBZ), shadow zones, and mic-based frequency response. The simple button and the rigorous math are the same tool.

Create your venue

Generate your own parametric venues, or draw any shape you need — even on top of a live satellite view.

Venue Creator — parametric venues

Don't have a CAD model? Generate one. Venue Creator builds 3D venues from parameters — arenas, amphitheaters, halls, rooms — that drop straight into the acoustic engine. Pick a shape, tune the numbers, send it to Fast Venue.

Shape Drawer — draw anything

Need a custom footprint? Shape Drawer lets you draw any kind of shape: rectangles, trapezoids, circles, ellipses, polygons, semicircles, tubes — then extrude them into 3D. Each shape can become geometry or an audience area directly.

Direct integration with world maps

Designing for a real outdoor site? Shape Drawer has direct integration with world maps — so you can pull satellite captures right inside the app. Search the location, switch to Street or Satellite, capture the view, and draw your audience footprint to real-world scale on top of the imagery.

Concept → report, in minutes

This is what Fast Venue is built for: get from the first idea to a finished technical report fast — in minutes, not days.

Everything you do — building the venue, placing speakers, painting the heat map — flows toward a deliverable. Work on the left, watch your report take shape on the right, and export when you're happy.

Quick start: cover a venue in audience areas — automatically

Import a model in any supported format, then cover it in audience areas in seconds. What used to be tedious is now a click.

First, choose how to start

From the Welcome screen you pick your entry point. To follow a real project from an external drawing, start with Build and then Import geometry.

Import a geometry from an external file

Bring in your model from any supported format — just import and Fast Venue figures out the type. We cover the industry standards like OBJ and DXF, plus 3D formats (glTF, GLB, Collada), images, CLF speaker models and full projects.

Our own updated SketchUp plugin

On top of the standards, Fast Venue ships its own updated SketchUp plugin — the Danley Direct Plugin — so you can export, import and preview your SketchUp work directly through the .danleyskp pipeline.

Then cover it — automatically

Right after importing, Fast Venue asks how to turn that geometry into a simulation surface. There is no single rigid workflow — pick what fits the model:

Each mode highlights a different set of surfaces, so you cover exactly what matters — compare:

(By layer is also available — pick the CAD layers that represent seating and ignore the rest.)

Automatic audience-surface detection — the Fast Venue way

Fast Venue offers automatic detection of audience surfaces, cutting out the slow manual work. Choose a mode and the matching surfaces are recognized and turned into audience areas in one step.

The proof: drop a speaker

Place a single speaker and the SPL heat map paints across the audience areas that were detected — confirming the surfaces were picked up correctly. What used to take many minutes of hand-tracing is already done.

Export, too — Fast Venue is also a converter

Just as you can import many geometries, you can also export several — which turns Fast Venue into a file-format converter in its own right. Bring a model in as one format and send it out as another (OBJ, DXF, DAE/Collada, glTF, .danleyskp), or grab a PNG/JPG capture. Fast Venue is super compatible.

Detecting stairs & bleachers

Tiered seating — bleachers, grandstands, raked stalls and stairs — is exactly what the Inclined surfaces mode is tuned for: Fast Venue picks out the sloped tiers by their angle and turns them into audience areas, so the heat map climbs the steps with the seats.

And when an imported drawing is just lines with no faces, the Detect surfaces tool rebuilds the surfaces from those lines — classifying them as floor, incline (bleachers) or wall — so even a bare CAD plan becomes simulatable seating.

See inside closed venues

When a venue is a closed box — a room, a hall, an arena with a roof — you can reveal the hidden geometry to look inside. Use Section Cut · See Inside (C) or drag the See-through imported geometry slider until the shell fades and the interior — seats, tables, the stage — comes into view.

Audience areas

Audience areas are the surfaces Fast Venue computes SPL on — the seating, the floor, the standing crowd. Auto-detect builds them for you; here's how to draw and shape them by hand.

Draw an audience in 3 clicks

From the Audiences menu choose Draw audience, then place three clicks. A live preview follows the cursor the whole time.

1. Click 1 — front-left. The start of the front edge.
2. Click 2 — front-right. Sets the front width and the direction the audience faces.
3. Click 3 — back corner. Sets the depth, the back width and which side it extends to.

That's it — a full audience surface, ready to be covered by the heat map.

Shape it with 3D handles

Select an audience and a set of 3D gizmos appears so you can reshape it right in the scene — no dialogs required:

Its properties panel

Right-click an audience to open its properties panel — every parameter in one place: position X / Y / Z, Color, Length, Width front and Width back, Rotation and Incline. The two buttons at the bottom — Redraw on map… and 3-Click on mesh… — re-run the drawing flow on the ground or snap it onto imported geometry.

Quick edit & redraw

• A green indicator floats over the nearest audience — click it to grab the handles without opening a panel.
• Right-click an audience to open its properties panel (name, position, width, length, incline, color).
• Redraw on map re-runs the 3-click flow to reshape an existing area.
• 3-Click on mesh snaps each click to the vertices of imported geometry — lay an audience straight onto a CAD model.

Read the result

Turn the simulation On and the SPL heat map paints across every audience area. Optional Audience SPL labels show the camera-facing average level at the center of each area.

Microphones & Frequency Response

The heat map tells you how loud every seat is at one frequency. Microphones tell you the whole story at one seat — the full response across the spectrum, magnitude and phase.

What a microphone is

A microphone in Fast Venue is a virtual measurement probe. Drop it anywhere — a key seat, the mix position, the back row — and it samples the combined output of every active speaker at that exact point. Mics don't change the sound; they listen to it, the way a measurement mic would on site.

Placing & tuning mics

• Add mics from the Mics menu — Add microphone (some templates already include a few).
• Drag a mic to move it; each one carries a name, position and color.
• The color is how you tell its curve apart in the Frequency Response chart.
• Place several to compare seats — front vs back, on-axis vs off-axis, left vs right.

Right-click a mic to open its properties panel — set its exact position X / Y / Z and pick its Color (the color it uses in the Frequency Response chart).

The Frequency Response panel

Open it with F, or right-click the viewport → Frequency Response. The panel plots, for every microphone, the response from 20 Hz to 20 kHz: a solid Magnitude curve (SPL in dB, left axis) and a dashed Phase curve (degrees, right axis). It's a floating, draggable panel — orbit and tweak the scene while it stays open.

What you can do here

Dock the response to the bottom

Prefer it out of the way? Use the panel's dock button to pin the Frequency Response to the bottom of the visualization — a full-width readout running under the 3D scene. Keep working on the venue up top while the curves stay in view the whole time.

Speakers

Speakers are the sources the whole simulation revolves around. Fast Venue gives you fast ways to place them and total control to aim and tune each one.

Place them fast

From the Speakers menu, pick the method that fits:

Choose how the box looks

In Config → General pick the speaker style. Cabinet (dark wood) renders solid Duratex-style boxes; Ray-X (semi-transparent pewter) lets you see the connector plate and what's behind; Wireframe is the lightest.

Total Control

Select a speaker to open Total Control — everything about that source in one panel: On / Inv / Solo / Mute, position X / Y / Z, aim Horiz / Incl / Spin, Gain and Delay, the Model, Layer and Color.

Move on its own axes

The most powerful part: nudge a speaker along its own local axes — Forward / Back, Sideways, Up / Down — instead of world X/Y/Z. The 3D arrows on the box show exactly which way it'll travel, so aiming a flown box feels physical.

Two camera shortcuts ride along: POV — view from behind (look out from the speaker toward the audience) and Locate — fly close (snap a far-away box to the foreground).

Aiming aids

• Laser rays (Z) — each active speaker fires a ray down its forward axis, truncating on the first audience it hits.
• Polar balloon (B) — the 3D directivity balloon of the selected speaker, so you see its real coverage shape.

Venue Creator

No CAD model? Generate one. Venue Creator builds complete 3D venues from a handful of parameters and sends them straight into the acoustic engine.

What it is

Venue Creator is a parametric venue generator — a dedicated tool with a deep library of venue types. Pick one, tune the numbers, and watch the 3D model rebuild live. When it looks right, send it to Fast Venue.

A library for almost every venue

There are dozens of ready-made venue types, so you rarely start from nothing:

How to use it

1. Open it. From the ✦ menu (or the Creation menu) choose Venue Creator. It opens as a full-screen tool over the app.
2. Pick a venue type. Choose a template from the library that matches your project.
3. Tune the parameters. Field size, bowl height, deck height, stand rake, rings, screens — drag the sliders and the model updates instantly.
4. Send to Fast Venue. One button hands the geometry to the app.

It lands like any other model

The venue arrives as imported geometry — audience surfaces and structure on their own layers — so everything you already know applies: cover it with audience areas, drop speakers, press On, export a report. Same pipeline as imported CAD.

Shape Drawer

Draw any footprint you need — then turn it into an audience area or 3D geometry. Even trace it to scale on top of a live satellite view.

Draw any shape

Shape Drawer gives you a full set of primitives: rectangle, trapezoid, parallelogram, circle, ellipse, octagon, N-sided polygon, semicircle, tube and line. Draw on the ground plane with a live status line guiding each click.

Precise, forgiving tools

Compose several shapes

Build a layout from many pieces. Each committed shape is kept so you can select and edit it individually later, and undo reaches across shapes — step back through the whole session, not just the current one. Switch between Select, Orbit and the drawing tools from the toolbar; Orbit hands the camera to free rotation, Select picks an existing shape to tweak.

Trace a plan image

Have an architect's plan as a picture? Drop it in as an image overlay and draw your audience footprint straight over it — handy when there's no CAD file, only a drawing.

Draw over satellite imagery

For real outdoor sites, Shape Drawer has direct world-map integration: search the location, switch between Street and Satellite, capture the view, and trace your footprint to real-world scale — right on top of the imagery.

Send to Fast Venue

When the shape is ready, send it over. Marked as audience, it becomes an audience area ready for the heat map; otherwise it lands as geometry. Either way it enters the normal pipeline — cover, simulate, report.

Fundamentals — finding your way around

Fast Venue has two ways in to everything: the left toolbar for the things you do constantly, and the main menu (☰) for the full, organized set of features. They complement each other.

The left toolbar — your quick rail

The vertical rail on the left is a quick-access shortcut bar. It doesn't replace the main menu — it lifts the most-used actions out of it so they're one click away while you work. Every button here also lives, in full context, inside the ☰ menu.

What's on the rail

• Project — New · Open · Save · Project Viewer.
• Files — Import… · Export… (the same many-format pipeline from the Quick start).
• Build tools — Venue Creator · Shape Drawer · Sub Arrays · Cluster Studio.
• Output & help — Movies · PDF Report · Settings · Help & guide.

The main menu (☰) — everything, organized

The hamburger menu, top-right, holds the complete feature set grouped into clear sections — Project, Import, Export, Audiences, Speakers, Mics, Simulation, Tools, Geometries, Presets, Config. When something isn't on the rail, it's here. Think of the rail as the express lane and the ☰ as the full directory.

The ✦ special menu (left of the ☰) is worth exploring — it gathers first-class extras: the venue presets, the Example library, the subsystems (Sub Arrays, Crowd Designer, Cluster Studio, Mago), Walk the venue, the Volumetric Field and the Auto Movie Report.

Project Manager

Create, save and reopen your work — and start from a ready-made venue instead of a blank stage.

New, Open, Save

• New — start a clean project (with a friendly confirm so you never lose work by accident).
• Open — load a saved .fastvenue project.
• Save / Save As — write the whole project — speakers, audiences, mics, imported geometry, simulation settings — to a single .fastvenue file.

All four are on the left toolbar (New · Open · Save · Project Viewer) and in the Project section of the ☰ menu.

The Project Viewer

The Project Viewer is a full-screen home for your projects. A sidebar switches between sources — Recently opened, Example library 1 and Example library 2 — with a search box, plus New project and Import… in the toolbar. Every project shows as a card with a live mini-preview thumbnail.

Start from a ready-made venue

The Example library ships dozens of finished venues you can load with one click — real stadiums and rooms like the Mercedes-Benz, Azteca, Bryant-Denny and Estadio Santos projects. It's the fastest way to explore Fast Venue, or to kick off from a venue close to yours. Each card's color-coded thumbnail lets you recognize the layout at a glance.

Configuration

Make Fast Venue fit how you work — units, look, world size, and how much of the interface you see.

Everything here lives in the Config section of the ☰ menu.

Units

Switch between Meters and Feet. Every length field, the world size and the grid update at once. (Internally Fast Venue always works in meters — only what you read and type is converted, so nothing drifts.)

Appearance

World size

Open General… to set the overall grid and floor size to match your venue — a stadium and a club don't need the same stage.

Experience level

Fast Venue can show as much or as little as you want. Pick the tier that fits:

UI Zoom

Scale the whole interface up or down with UI Zoom (shortcut V) — comfortable on a laptop or a big control-room display alike.