I am brand new to UE4, but not to sound production, or ideas for games.
Can one assign parameters to each master material, that would affect things like reverb changes?
Such that, if my character walks from one room to the next, the game reverb would change, preferably gradually in sync with the character’s position.
I’m also interested in knowing just how much depth we can get from the sound engine. Can we use impulse reverbs for example, or are we stuck with one reverb plugin?
Could I create a chorus effect, by pitching the original sound up and down via a wave, and play it together with the original?
And lastly, can we work with primitive sounds within the engine, fx. footsteps, and have changes happen to them procedurally, so they never sound exactly the same? Like a random factor for filters. A bit of low pass, high pass and volume could maybe come a long way to remove the “Robocop” effect of footsteps.
Cheers from Denmark!
All the things you mentioned are possible, but not all of them are necessarily best implemented exactly like you describe. For different room reverbs for example, we usually “fake it” with different volumes in each area, that determine how sounds in and out of the volumes are processed, when the player is inside the different volumes.
There are some very cool and interesting sound source effects(in new audio engine) and later bus effects, like different types of delays, that could for sure be used to emulate realistic early reverb slaps and similar. How well it works and how expensive it is depends on how far you go with your implementation of it. The basic tools are there.
With some BP logic we can definitely do whatever to sound-parameters, say every time we play a footstep. Sky is the limit really - could be true randomness just for some basic variety, or we could use the physics that is going on to have the sounds correspond really well to what kind of intensity or type of movement that is happening.
I have a temporary solution. It is easy to calculate online how different surfaces, surface types and room sizes affect the sound. One could define parameters for different materials and assign sensors that change the setting in each area. It may not be quite there, but if people start taking into account how wood and glass affect the frequency spectrum differently, one might be able to get some results with EQ.
Maybe one could just drop a ball into a room and it scans it’s properties and renders an audio pipeline?
If I managed to pull this reverb thing off, would it be worth money in the assets store?
Also, if I managed to create a pack with super good footsteps that respond to surfaces, would people want that?