Hi Everyone,
Hope you’re all good! I’m pretty new to Unreal so definitely a bit of a novice. Currently working on a small 3rd person project and have a question. The level is basically set up so you’re inside a building with a few windowed/walled rooms, and eventually enter into a larger chamber that opens out into an outdoor space - and it’s open plan (no windows/doors), so it’s a sort of gradual transition from interior to exterior.
My aim is to gradually fade in the exterior ambience so that as you approach the exit of the chamber you gradually hear more of the exterior ambience, until you’re outside and it’s full volume. Similarly, when you re-enter the chamber, as you get further in the exterior ambience declines in volume until it’s no longer audible at a certain point in the chamber. I hope I’ve described it in a way that makes sense!
I’ve encountered a bit of a conundrum that I’m hoping I can get some help with. If I create an ambient sound with a falloff for the exterior cue, I can get the effect I want. The problem is, however, because of the shape of the level I’m working on, the exterior ambient sound doesn’t fit everywhere I need it to whilst still having the falloff at the right place in the level - meaning I’d need to create multiple ambient sounds to fit around the level. That seems both visually messy, logically suspect and it’s also of course causing issues as one ambient sound overlaps or fades into another. It just seems a bad solution to a fairly simple problem.
The obvious solution is to use audio volumes. They work fine for separating the closed rooms off from the exterior, and using them means I can just have one ambient sound as the general “exterior “ ambience and then shape how it sounds in different areas with audio volumes. The problem is getting that transition effect between the chamber and the exterior. With audio volumes you can of course specify a time to interpolate between the starting volume and finishing volume once you enter/exit a volume, but this doesn’t work for my needs. The moment you enter the volume the sound just fades up irrespective of what happens next, and fades back out when you leave, so of course it’s not realistic and doesn’t work.
If I haven’t made a right botch up of explaining this issue, I’m wondering if anybody knows of a good workaround or a way to create a sort of falloff within the audio volume, so that as the player gets further into the volume it would fade up/down in correlation with the special position of the player? I can think of a few workarounds - maybe creating a transition ambient sound or some kind of intermediate audio layer to smooth the transition. I could probably get it to work, but I feel there must be a more straightforward or logical way of doing it, and want to make sure I’m not missing anything silly or right in front of my nose.
Thanks so much for any help or advice anybody might be able to give, and thanks for reading.