I think doppler via pitch shifting can often be a little cheesy for your effect so I’d first try to “sound design” a woosh that includes whatever effect you want in the woosh via your DAW.
To trigger something like this I’d recommend brushing up on blueprints. There’s some details about how to avoid doing too many ticks with BP, but in principle, this should be easily achieved by writing a BP which does 2 things:
- Get the distance of the actor to the listener.
- Get the actor velocity. If the actor is a scene component, you can do this directly by calling GetComponentVelocity
With the above data you can create BP variables which allow you to tweak thresholds: A distance threshold would define a distance below which you allow a woosh sound to play on the moving actor and the velocity value is a threshold above which you play a sound. Both thresholds have to be reached before you play the sound. So a slow moving ship won’t do the woosh or a ship really far away won’t do the woosh.
You can get fancy and use different threshold ranges to define “near/medium/far” wooshes and “slow/medium/fast” wooshes too.
BP is a very powerful tool for sound design and you have direct access to all the game state you need to do really cool things.
If you have lots of ships where this woosh might be something you want to play, there are other tricks you can do to optimize. Rather than have a bunch of BPs running doing this on every ship, you can have one that slowly sorts ships by distance, then feeds the results to your BP which determines if any of the nearest X ones match your threshold criteria, etc.
Doing this in sound cues is also possible but I believe would still require you to do BP work to determine sound cue params to feed to your sound cue so you can do the threshold calculation there, but might as well just play the sound from BP if you’re going to be doing that.