I am a sound maker for the racing simulator Assetto Corsa. I have some raw engine sounds of certain cars which sound as if they were recorded from the engine bay of the car. Since the driver will not be driving his car with his ear glued to the bonnet, I wondered if there is a way to make it sound as though the engine are being projected in a metal box (which is what a car is), or even a room. Something that sounds more natural than having engine sounds shoved straight down your ear.
So I played around with the reverb and echo effects but due to be being a beginner I don’t know how to manipulate the controls to make this effect.
There’s no “One True Way” to do what you describe, but I recommend experimenting with the Multiband EQ effect. It’s relatively cheap, and can be configured to emphasize or de-emphasize specific frequency bands, making it an effective way of simulating sounds muffled by distance or intervening barriers.
If you can afford more CPU, then the FMOD Convolution Reverb is the next thing to try after Multiband EQ. You can create a more complex and smoother sounding reverb effect in your DAW, then “bake” it into a reverb impulse by driving a single byte click through it, and use that as the impulse response in the Convolution.
Convolution Reverb can be added to an event (it doesn’t have to be in the mixer) so each car engine event can have its own internal version.
However, if you really prefer to save CPU, you might consider baking interior versions of the engine sound wavs themselves, and switching to those in the interior view. As in, just bake the effect into the wavs. However reverb and filtering, if baked into wavs, doesn’t handle pitch changes very well. So if you are using loops that get pitched up and down a lot, baked reverb may end up sounding really odd.