Hi.
I work in a university in the UK teaching audio production. I recently picked up a module on Games Audio which is fascinating to teach, but brings with it some significant chanllenges in terms of workflow translation from my usual tools (Logic, MaxMSP, ProTools, Fairlight, Digital Performer, etc).
One of the things I’m finding very challenging is when I’m trying to design “real” sounding acoustic spaces that behave properly:
For example, having multiple sound sources in one large reverberant space (imagine a large cathedral). I need the reverberant energy of all sounds to remain “reasonably” constant at all points in the space (once eneegy has built to its natural sustained point) as would happen in a real situation, whilst the direct sound should fall according to a modified inverse square law (allowing for floor reflections, etc). The “natural sound” attenuation curve is a good approximation to this attenuation of the direct portion.
However, it seems that the default setup with attenuation(reverb) does not implement this - rather the reverb falls off almost as quickly as the direct falloff. This is all a matter of D/R ratio.
At close proximity to the sound source the ratio between Direct (D) energy and reverberent (R) energy would be very much in favour of the direct sound, whereas at greater distances it would be move to being in favour of the reverberent energy - ultimately to the point where the direct element is almost at -ve infinity dB (0 amplitude).
This can, I guess, be put into an attenuation preset and applied to all sound assets (be they cues or other).
However, Is there a clean efficient and “sound-engineer” friendly way of doing this using an audio bussing model - the equivalent of pre-fade (pre-attenuation?) sends onto the reverb bus associated with an Audio GamePlay volume - reverb component - for that space (cathedral)?
I’m reletaively new to UE5 and strugling to find some of these answers.
It would be great to have a truer representation of the audio signal flow and any hierarchical bussaing architecture. Is this available anywhere in the engine - as I can;t find it?
I thus find the audio routing system quite confusing and unintuitive - and I fear this maybe because I’m mixing up functionality of legacy and new features? If this is the cas then is there a way to only use new features and disable all legacy features to simnplify the process for new adopters?
Any clues or links to graphical representation of the signal routing would be great.
Maany thanks…
B.