I’m wondering if there are some in depth tutorials or someone with experience in creating a 7.1 project in FMOD and UE5.
Please excuse me if my terms aren’t correct this is my first time doing surround and with FMOD.
We have multiple platform banks for various outputs like binaural, tv stereo, large speaker stereo, 5.1, and 7.1. The game has menu settings to change the audio format. In FMOD, I have a bus for each format as the last stop before the master output, so that I can place an eq curve to adjust for the different speaker type.
Specifically I’m wondering about bus settings. Should I basically force all the bus outputs to 7.1 and then they will fold down once ther signal reaches the final eq bus, with the final eq bus folding to its correct channel count ie, stereo 5.1 etc?
I’m looking for any information that will guide me in best practices for surround sound projects and welcome any information that will help me avoid pitfalls. Thanks for any help!
Are you aware that you can define target platforms for your project, and specify a speaker channel format for each such platform, in the “build” tab of FMOD Studio’s preference dialog?
These speaker channel formats are then automatically used by every spatializer effect in your project, as well as by any bus or track whose input or output speaker channel format is set to “platform,” when building the banks for that platform. This feature allows you to avoid creating multiple redundant buses for different speaker channel formats.
If you for any reason need to use different effects for each platform, you can simply set certain effects to be excluded on certain platforms by right-clicking on the effect and selecting "Include on… “<platform name>” from the context menu. This means that you can avoid having to create multiple redundant buses for different platforms, since you can instead make different effects (or different versions of the same effect) for different platforms, all on the one set of buses.
Thanks for that info. I’ll pass this along to the technical sound designer.
If anyone has any “wish I knew when I started” advice please feel free to share. I want to learn as much as I can about setting up and running this project in 7.1 and properly folding down to other formats.
We have had a similar problem. Posting this here because I’m curious if there is a better approach to this.
Our approach is creating our own subsystem in UE5 where we load build configuration and banks. Whenever a bank is loaded through this system, it generates the file path relative to the selected build configuration based on the asset path of the UFMODBank file.
As an example; a project has 2 platform builds, Desktop and PCSurround. Whenever a bank needs to be loaded or unloaded, the subsystem takes the file path of an UFMODBank object, and replaces the substring “Desktop” with the appropriate configuration (e.g. PCSurround). The resulting file path is used to load the bank with loadBankFile.
This method also works well with localized audio tables, where FMOD automatically generates localized bank files that are referenced by the same UFMODBank object because you only replace the substring that directs to the appropriate folder.