I’m trying to generate random bird sounds in an environment. Most of the clips I have are single chirps. Usually birds will chirp a handful of times and not just once, so I’m using the Scatterer to achieve my bird sounds. But of course if the same bird chirped four times in four different random locations it would sound like he was teleporting around the world, so I’ve tried addressing this with nested events.
The main event I fire when I want to hear birds is Bird Chirp, a Timeline with a single Scatterer instrument which triggers one (or more) of a set of specific bird nested events at random, such as Hawk or Crow.
Crow is also a Timeline with a single Multi Instrument that plays either of two Timeline Events: Two Chirps or Three Chirps.
Two Chirps and Three Chirps are Timeline events which just play audio clips.
No matter how I set the Scatter Distance, the chirps always sound the same. Even if I set the min and max to 10k, they don’t get any quieter.
Hi okaybenji,
It sounds like you are missing a spatialiser effect on the event nested inside the scatterer (so the nested event is a 2D event). The event requires a spatialiser to be placed into 3D space.
Another option is to place the multi instrument directly into the scatterer - event instruments will give you more fine control, but a multi instrument inside the scatterer might give you enough to achieve what you are looking to do.
Exactly right! Thank you so much.
Hmm, now the bird sounds are spatialized in FMOD, but when I play the game in Unity I can’t hear them at all. (I can still hear other sounds that use a Scatterer to position them, but those are just using audio clips instead of nested events with a spatializer effect.)
You might need to make sure that the scatter distance isn’t then spawning the event too far from the listener. Also, check the spatialiser on the nested events min and max distance. They will change how sound attenuates by distance.
Thanks again for your help on this. I checked all these values and they look correct. Then on a whim I decided to try disabling the FMOD Studio Listener attached to our player GameObject in Unity before running the game, and suddenly the bird sounds returned.
Enabling it again while the game is running silences the birds, and disabling again at that point does not bring them back. You have to stop the game and start it up again.
So there’s something funky going on with the listener in the scene.
It seems that not enabling the listener when running the game means that the listener will not be getting position updates, and I suspect it will be behaving as though it is at 0,0,0 (assuming it is the only listener in the scene).
If you can hear the birds in this case, then perhaps the position for the birds event isn’t being updated correctly and is defaulting to 0,0,0?