Impulse Features
Material Assignment
Realistic Presets
Impulse has about 60 materials already built-in for you to work with. Eventually we plan on partnering up with manufacturers to offer simulations of materials you can readily buy.
We Make it Easy
Impulse groups 3D polygons based on a number of factors, making it so that instead of having select individual triangles, you select simplified groups of them instead.
Auto-Assignment
When you import 3D geometry, you can use Impulse’s “Auto Assign” mode, where it looks through your model’s material names and performs textual inference to figure out which presets would correspond to where, and assigns them so you don’t have to.
Sound check
Preview mode allows you to hear how your acoustic space sounds in real time. Move the source, listener, and change the material parameters and hear the difference.
Do it live
You can either use a prerecorded audio file that gets fed into the preview processing system, or you can feed in live sound through your audio interface of choice (only one channel, of course).
Realtime Preview
Compatibility
Mesh Compatibility
Impulse uses the “Assimp” library for handling it’s needs for importing 3D meshes. Assimp has a wide variety of different formats that can be imported, and the ones that work the best are .obj, .dae, .3ds, and .stl files. Most 3D editors offer these formats as export options.
Program Compatibility
We plan on developing direct integrations for the most popular game engines down the line, as well as offering direct sketchup & CAD importing. Please check out our Roadmap for more information.
Work like you already do
Impulse is built to work like the 3D editors that already exist, and you have probably used before. Presently the editor functions almost identically to the way that Blender does. We plan on offering alternate control methods for systems including material assignment, object transforms, and camera movement down the line.
Don’t get stuck
We know that Impulse can be high-concept. We accounted for that!
Context-aware information for almost every control can be found at the bottom “info bar” when you mouse over various elements of the interface, and some of them even dynamically change based on the program’s state, so you will get as deep of an understanding of how this all works as we do.
Check out our knowledge base for a tutorial on how to quickly get started with Impulse.
Interactivity
Simulate & Render
Acoustic Simulation
To render an impulse response, you first must simulate the acoustic propagation in the Simulate panel. This is kept to only a few controls, and a progress bar will show you how far along you are in the process (It’s pretty fast, though).
Rendering Options
You can go very in-depth with exactly how everything is to be rendered with the Render Settings view, but everything that’s set as default provides a solid starting point.
Render Analysis
Impulse will display a lot of helpful analysis information on every impulse response that gets rendered, including a typical waveform display, a spectrogram, a mode resonance graph, and a spatial energy plot.
Spatial Settings
Impulse offers a variety of different spatial encodings for the outputted audio, mono & stereo are available (of course), and we also offer different quality binaural outputs.
Impulse can also render directly to an ambisonic channel set, up to the 7th order. (this may take awhile, though!)
Batch Processing
You can render multiple IRs in the rendering step at once, and you can also save all IRs at once as well. All IRs can have their sample rates converted to a unified value and their peaks normalized when this happens for more convenient use.