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Wwise SDK 2021.1.14
Rooms and Portals

With Wwise Spatial Audio, late reverberation is designed using reverb Effects and auxiliary sends. Wwise Spatial Audio supports this workflow by exposing a simple, high-level geometry abstraction called Rooms and Portals, which allows it to efficiently model sound propagation of emitters located in other rooms. The main features of room-driven sound propagation are diffraction and coupling and spatialization of reverbs. It does so by leveraging the tools at the disposal of the sound designer in Wwise, giving them full control of the resulting transformations to audio. Furthermore, it allows you to restrict game engine-driven raycast-based obstruction, which is highly game engine-specific, and typically costly in terms of performance, to emitters that are within proximity of the same room as the listener. Note that you can also defer obstruction entirely to Wwise Spatial Audio by using the geometry API (see Using the Geometry API for Simulating Diffraction and Transmission).

Rooms are dimensionless and are connected with one another by Portals, which together form a network of rooms and apertures by which sound emitted in other rooms may reach the listener. Spatial Audio uses this network to modify the distance traveled by the dry signal, the apparent incident position, and the diffraction angle. The diffraction angle is mapped to obstruction and/or to a built-in game parameter called Diffraction, which designers may bind to properties (such as volume and low-pass filtering) using RTPC. Spatial Audio also positions adjacent rooms' reverberation at their portals, and permits coupling of these reverbs into the listener's room reverb, using 3D busses. Lastly, rooms have an orientation, which means that inside rooms the diffuse field produced by the associated reverb is rotated prior to reaching the listener, tying it to the game's geometry instead of the listener's head.


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