I have several inconsistent behaviors for ambiant soundscapes in my project, and I wanted clarify the native behavior of them as I can’t find a clear direct answer from a single thread, and some information is kind of lost in unrelated questions.
So my question is : Are events containing nested events, handling the spatialization at the event level.
IE : will a child event with a 3D spatializer properly position the audio while its parent is a 2D sound without spatializer?
To answer this question you must understand one key fact: Spatialization is technically never applied at the event level. Instead, it’s applied to signals.
Nearly every effect works in basically the same way: It sits on a specific track or bus, in a specific position in that track or bus’s signal chain (which you can see in the deck when you select the track or bus in the event editor or mixer). The effect receives a signal from whatever is to its left in that signal chain, processes that signal, and it outputs the processed signal to its right*. The spatializer effect is no exception: It receives a signal from its left, processes that signal by panning and attenuating it in order to make it sound like it comes from a specific distance and direction, then outputs the processed signal to its right.
When an event contains an event instrument, triggering that event instrument spawns an instance of the referenced event, and routes that instance’s output into the track of the parent event on which the event instrument sits. Thus, when a child event contains a spatialzer effect on its master track, and the parent event does not, that spatializer effect processes the signal routed through the child event’s master bus. The processed signal that effect outputs becomes an input signal of the parent event, where it is mixed with the other signals in the parent event. Since the parent event contains no spatializer effect, the mixed signal is not processed by a spatializer again.
The end result is that the content of the child event will be spatialized, but no other content of the parent event will be.
*In rare cases, an effect might output a signal to somewhere other than to its right. That’s not relevant to most spatialization, but might be important if your project makes use of object spatializer effects or some third-party spatializing effects.