spaces

A Spaces model describes a place by what it is: a room's clear size, a wall's centreline, a deck's area, a block of seats. ixi derives the geometry. Every element gives you two drawings at once, a 3D body and a floor-plan symbol, and they never drift apart because the plan is not sliced from the 3D.

the modes

Choose Spaces in the mode picker:

mode	what you do there
Plan	walls, rooms and openings on the floor plan
Build	the space in 3D, push/pull massing, walk through
Stage & rigging	decks, truss, fixtures, screens, seating

Units are millimetres, with the floor at zero. The audience stands on the minus-y side, upstage is plus-y. Switch the document to feet and inches and only the display changes.

rooms, walls and openings

In Plan or Build, the ribbon has Room, Wall, Door / window (hotkeys <kbd>W</kbd> and <kbd>D</kbd> for the last two) and Floor.

• Room makes a venue shell in one step: clear inside width, depth and height, wall thickness, a floor slab and a ceiling. The ceiling is its own part, so you can hide it when looking from above. A room can also take an outline polygon.
• Wall draws a partition as a centreline. Walls whose ends meet share a corner: an L mitres, a T and an X join without hand-splitting. A wall can be offset left, right or centred on its line.
• Door / window cuts openings into a wall: door, double door, window, plain opening or arch. You set where along the wall, width, height, sill, which way it swings and how far open it is. An opening that runs off its wall or overlaps another is reported and not cut.

Click any wall or opening and the inspector edits that element.

stage and rigging

In Stage & rigging:

tool	makes
Deck	platforms from standard modules (2 × 1 m, 8 × 4 ft, 1 × 1 m or custom), with skirt, steps and rails
Truss	runs on a path, cut into stock lengths with corner blocks, with towers, hoists and hung fixtures
Pipe	pipes, battens and booms
LED wall	screens in whole tiles, reporting pixel size and weight
Drapes	legs, borders, cycs, scrims and tabs, reporting fabric length
Seating	blocks of rows with rake, curve, aisles and a focus point
Fly, Lift, Turntable	a piece that moves on a joint, ready to animate

Truss, deck and screen buttons start from a working example that you then edit. Fixtures (spots, washes, beams, pars, profiles, fresnels, LED bars, blinders, strobes) hang on their truss or pipe and are aimed at a point, so a fly bar carries its lights. The plan draws each with its unit number and channel.

A screen's face is its own surface. Ask the modeler to paint a sandbox, an animation or an image composer onto it and the content plays live on the wall.

numbers that come with it

The Stage report and the status line show:

• Capacity: seats, in how many blocks
• Worst sightline (C): under 60 mm the row in front blocks the view, 90 is good, 120 excellent. Raise the rake until it is 90 or more.
• decks, truss length, fixture schedule, LED tiles and pixels
• Hung weight, with the heaviest pickup

Each element also warns in plain words: decks above 600 mm without rails, a pickup over its safe working load, a run nothing is holding, truss leftovers that no stock length fills.

look inside

The viewport controls for a space are in the top bar.

• Saved views (camera icon): aim the camera, name it, press Save view. A row takes you back there. A view remembers its section cut.
• Section: cuts a plan through the model at 1.2 m. Facing me makes a vertical cut through what you are looking at.
• Walk: first person at 1.6 m eye height. Drag to look, <kbd>W</kbd> <kbd>A</kbd> <kbd>S</kbd> <kbd>D</kbd> or the arrows to walk, <kbd>Q</kbd> and <kbd>E</kbd> to go down and up, <kbd>Shift</kbd> to run, <kbd>Esc</kbd> to stop.

A saved view is the way to answer "what does the seat in row F see?": put the eye at seat height and the target on the stage edge.

furnish it

A space can hold the other models on your canvas. Each piece of furniture or product is its own 3D model node, placed into the room as a reference with the + on the model's references row: a bed, a nightstand, a lamp, a rug. Change the bed and every room it stands in follows. A fabric can be painted live by an image composer, so one room can try a new pattern on the duvet, the drapes and a cushion at once.

That is how a bedroom for a home-textile range is built in ixi: the room in Build, every product a model of its own, every pattern a composer, and a saved view for each shot. See place other models and live textures.

export

The plan exports as SVG or DXF, the same drawing Plan mode shows, with the lighting plot. The 3D exports as GLB or PNG.

limits & good to know

• A deck can be up to 100 m by 10 m high, in modules of 250 mm or more, and up to 2,000 modules.
• A truss run: up to 300 m, 50 m high, 4,000 pieces per step.
• Screens: up to 200 × 200 tiles · seating: up to 20,000 seats per step · drapes up to 100 m.
• Beyond a limit, the element is not built and the step says why.
• Spaces are left out of collision checks, because wall faces are not closed solids.
• Plan labels are in millimetres whatever the document display.

related

• assembly and motion: animate a fly bar or a turntable
• variants and checks
• overview