Playing sound from inside geometry?

Question

Right now when playing a sound event whose location is clipping inside a geometry set, it is occluded by the geometry. While this makes sense from a simulation perspective, I'd rather that in this case it ignores the engulfing geometry.
This would be especially useful for bullet impacts hitting geometry and playing sound, or really any kind of collision based sound. This is because in this case, the blocking geometry is also the sound source.

Is there a way to make it so sounds pass through geometries that clip into them, but still have the sound be obstructed by other non-clipping geometries?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Having a sound emitter from inside geometry (e.g., character, bullet model) is not a supported scenario in general: the system does not know it is in some "engulfing geometry". The system does not distinguish empty regions from solid regions.
In general, you'll want to avoid having that kind of geometry be part of the geometry used by Wwise for spatial audio.

For a source clipping into a wall, the wall causes transmission loss. There is a certain degree of control to the transmission loss % through acoustic textures (see Transmission in UE Wwise Integration documentation).

Comments

Hey Samuel, thanks for the clarification! Due to the assumption-less nature of the game, I planned to abstract some of the geometry sent to Wwise. While these news prevent me from implementing this abstraction, I believe I'll be able to make it work, albeit with perhaps more expensive complexity.

Have a great day!