How to make SFX change on camera angle ( Jet / rocket engine ) ?

Development Audio
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Hello, how to make jet engine sound direct when looking at the center of it or hearing it from the side?
I am new to audio so sorry if this is trivial. Is it that when you look at it camera trace, you add another audio? I genuinely dont have any idea how to do this.

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Hi StarScream, Cool question.

My first thought is to use DotProduct. Imagine a vector in the middle of the engine pointing towards the nose of the plane. - you then have your view cameras vector. - Comparing those two with DotProduct will result in a value from -1 to 1. - It being 1 when both vectors are aligned.

So, feeding that DotProduct into some sort of Volume lerping node would probably give you good results.

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I was unsure on how the audio component should be handled, so I took a shot at setting a system up.

You’ll need to use a “Spawn Sound’“ node to be able to change the volume in real-time. (Other nodes are “Fire and Forget”)

There might be a more robust/elegant way to accomplish this with Sound Mixes, but this is what I came up with:

Screenshot 2025-10-23 122511
Screenshot 2025-10-23 1225111530×838 140 KB

Let me know if you have any troubles/questions.

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Thanks a bunch, I cant thank you enough for the detail ‘‘use a Spawn sound‘‘ , originally i wanted to do some deep dive into meta sounds but I dont have time for that now :frowning: from what i heards its powerful but also very hard to learn.

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