Hi, since I got zero traction on my previous (likely too broad!) post, I’ve got a narrowed it a bit:
I’ve got occlusion traces working, and am assessing the best way to make sources sound far away within the context of reverb? Think caves with a few different types of verb to reflect different spaces.
My first attempt is to use a ‘Send’ (to reverb) and a ‘Gain’ insert on events - modulating both with the occlusion parameter. This appears to work to allow me to control wet verb and dry signal independently per event instance. I can also see how I could also mix reverbs if the event source inhabits a different reverb space.
I’m still curious if anyone has opinions about this approach, or might advise another?
I think what you’ve done is generally the recommended starting point for occlusion. From here you can extend your system with:
- Transmission- by adding an LPF after the gain and ducking the highs when occluded, which matches real-world occlusion a little more.
- Diffraction- by dynamically adding transceivers to your cave entrances. There’s a discussion on this here in the context of Unity, but the same principles apply to Unreal.
- Reflection- by automating reverb and delay based on the dimensions of the room that the player is in. There’s a great example of this technique here.
If you are designing for narrow interiors, such as corridors and rooms, combining Unreal Audio Volumes with FMOD Snapshots (thus creating reverb zones) can give you more control over occlusion and reverb characteristics for a given space- i.e walking past a window puts the mixer into one state, walking past a concrete wall puts it into another. It’s computationally cheaper without all the ray tracing, but it’s less generic since it’s harder to execute with exteriors.
Hopefully that gives you some inspiration on where to go next, and other possible implementations if you want to attempt them. Let me know if you have any more questions!
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Ok, good to know I’m on the right track! Those are some really interesting examples, thanks for sharing, I really appreciate it and will dig further. The dynamic reflection setup is quite cool (and his other systems are quite cool to see as well).
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