Disable all automatic obstruction and occlusion values from Unreal

Question

I've found that some objects in Unreal are obstructing audio automatically without having an AK component on them at all. That could be a big time saver for some projects, however I'm finding that small objects are obstructing sounds 100% which just sounds like the source is dropping out. Is there a simple way to turn this feature off, and only have AK components with a transmission loss parameter or similar obs/occ sounds? As I currently have no control over the values. I'd really really like to avoid creating a blueprint for every model in the game to set occlusion refresh interval to zero.

Unreal 5.1.1
Wwise 2022.1.3

Comments

As an example, I have a chainlink fence which is occluding all audio by 100% by default (completely unrealistic). Being able to set this value per object/material is critical so I would love to know if there is something I'm missing.

Answer 1

Hello hp57,

It sounds like your Ak Ambient component might have the Occlusion Refresh Interval set to a non-zero value.  By default, this value is set to 0.2, which will enable Wwise to leverage the Unreal occlusion system in order to apply filtering on the sound.  You can disable this by settin gthe value to 0.0 on each Ak Ambient to disable it, and Wwise will opt out of this.  

Alternatively, if you want your sound to use Unreal Occlusion, but not for each object in the map (such as your chainlink fence example), you can adjust the Collision properties on your fence asset so that the Ak Ambient objects don't "see" it.

Here's some material about that if you are unfamiliar with the concept: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/collision-filtering

Hope that helps!