I want the scattered sounds to be placed in the 3D world, so that I would hear which way they’re coming from if I turn around. By vague I just mean that I’d only be able to pinpoint their location to a general direction like 120degress and not within 10degress. That’s what the “minExtent” knob seems to do, right? And, with the min distance, I was after having no sounds spawned so close that I would pass through them when I turn around.
I don’t have an advanced setup, and I can start over: I’ll just tell you the scenario, and you’ll probably know the best way to do it: I’m trying to scatter bird sounds in the distance around the player. (Close sounds are made separately by actual bird objects.) If scattered sounds spawned close too, they might spawn in empty air, with no bird mesh in sight…
I probably spawn it the wrong way too. If I have a emitter stuck to my player, the spatialization is lost, and if I play the event as 2D, it works - but if I walk away from the location the sounds don’t spawn around my new location…
Your understanding is correct: The extent of a spatialized signal determines how broadly the signal is spread over multiple speakers when it is a distance away from the listener, and min extent determines the lowest possible value that extent can have.
Hmm… Besides extent, how are you spatializing the signal of each individual spawn? The primary means by which spatialization is achieved are:
Attenuating the sound based on the emitter’s distance from the listener, such that more distant sounds are quieter and thus sound like they’re coming from further away.
Panning the sound based on its position relative to the listener, such that sounds seem like they’re coming from the direction from the listener to the emitter.
Can I assume you have taken steps to ensure that these changes are applied to the sounds spawned by your scatterer instrument - perhaps by adding spatializer effects to the events referenced by the event instruments in your scatterer instrument’s playlist?
Wait, you mean the scatter instrument doesn’t do that itself? It only provides virtual locations? And then the attenuation and/or panning needs to be applied by you?
I have got one event with a scatterer instrument that has nested events with spatialization applied, and that one seems to work the way I want, so that is the required setup then?
Those virtual locations though. I want them to keep spawning around my player (follow player), but not move once spawned (not follow player) (or even worse, rotate with player once spawned) What setup would allow for that?
As you surmise, the scatterer instrument doesn’t normally spatialize the sounds it spawns; it only generates random positional offsets, and passes them to the sounds it spawns. (As a convenience feature, it does add a hidden spatializer effect with default settings to single instruments in its playlist, but this benefit only applies to single instruments and has some limitations that prevent it from being useful in your use-case.)
For playlist entries that are event instruments, the easiest way to spatialize them is to put a spatializer effect on the referenced event’s master track; for other instrument types, the easiest way is to wrap the instrument in a nested event and put a spatializer effect on the referenced event’s master track.
That should work, provided the nested events contain spatializing behavior of some kind. Spatializer effects on their master tracks would do it.
Replacing the event instruments in the scatterer instrument’s playlist with “start event” command instruments would do it. Event instances spawned by command instruments inherit the parent event’s position (with the offset generated by the cattered instrument) when they’re created, but do not move with the parent event thereafter.
Note that you can’t target nested events with a “start event” command instrument, so you’ll have to convert your nested events into non-nested events if you want to do this. To convert a nested event into a non-nested event, select the nested event in the events browser and drag it to any location outside of its parent event.
Many thanks for the answer!
I should be able to get that working now. It’s more steps to do a (in my mind basic) thing than I expected from my first experience with fmod. But it’s cool that nesting allow you to make more complex things to.
It’s because there’s no One True Way to spatialize a sound. The spatializer effect suits many use-cases, but “most” isn’t “all,” so we can’t assume that everyone wants their scatterer instruments’ spawned sounds to be spatialized that way.