Hi there, I’ve been trying to find a solution to this for a while, and I’m hoping the community can help. I’m trying to place an ambient sound in an inaccessible area outside the house the player is in. While fine-tuning the attenuation, I’ve run into an issue where the sound is bleeding into another room of the house. On top of that, I’d like to set a roll-off point so that the closer the player gets to the windows, the more they hear the street ambience.
Normally, I’d create a rectangular attenuation shape and map out the space using the UE5 audio tools, but since I’m using FMOD, I don’t have that option. From what I can tell, the FMOD spatializer only supports spherical attenuation. Worst case, I could handle this specific bit of sound design with a UE5 sound cue, but surely there must be a way to achieve something this straightforward in FMOD.
Personally, I’d create a snapshot in FMOD Studio that reduces the volume of the group bus the event routes into to -oo dB, then tie that snapshot to an Unreal audio volume that fills the room in which I don’t want the sound to play. That covers preventing outdoor sounds from playing indoors.
Then, to make sounds become audible when the player nears a window, I’d create another snapshot, which sets the volume of the group bus to 0 dB and has a snapshot priority slightly higher than that of the first snapshot. Then, I’d give it a built-in distance parameter, and automate the intensity of the snapshot on that distance parameter such that intensity is 100% when the listener is close, and 0% when the listener is far away. I wouldn’t associate this new snapshot with an audio volume; instead, I’d create instances of the snapshot as if they were event instances at every window in my building.
Because the second snapshot is a higher priority than the first snapshot, the second snapshot will override the first whenever the player is near to a window, and the slope of the automation curve ensures that this change to the mix ramps up and down in intensity as the player moves toward or away from such a window.