Fountains come in a lot of different sizes, from a small desktop water feature, to a large installation in a town square. While you can hear that the Fountain you’ve imported seems to be somewhere in between, it’s helpful to define the Object’s size. Just like each Object can be given an X, Y, Z coordinate to represent its position in a space, an Object can also be given a Width, Length and Height to represent its occupied size in that space.
- In the Object List, scroll to the Acoustic Size & Shape area.
You can see that the Default Size is 1.2 meters wide, 1.2 meters long and 00.6 meters tall.
Note: a value of 0, 0, 0 means the Object has no size or shape. This doesn’t really seem possible, but when the size values are all set to 0, it means that the Object has a single point source of origin.
Give your fountain a physical size by making it into a 1 meter cube. - Change the Width, Length and Height properties to 1 meter.
You may think that the size of the octahedron that represents the Object’s position is somehow related to the Acoustic Size & Shape properties, and you may have expected the size of the octahedron to change, but they aren’t related. It is possible to turn on the visualization of the size, but this is displayed using a transparent box shape that must be enabled. - Click the Show acoustic size checkbox.
Now you see a box representing the size of the Fountain Object.
In the 8 speaker deployment represented in the current Spacemap, nearly all of the sound of the fountain would be divided between the lower left and right speakers. What if the fountain was more of a waterfall that stretched upward in the Spacemap? You can easily achieve this by adjusting the height property. Instead of typing a value, you can drag values in the inspector. - Click and hold the Height value and drag the cursor upwards to increase the height value to approximately 5 meters.
As the value changed, you could see how the height of the Object expands upward and downward from the center. This means that half of the fountain is below the floor. This is not necessarily a problem as it’s feasible to place Objects below ground level and in some deployments there may even be speakers positioned below the floor to take advantage of this.
In this case, raise the center of the fountain Object upwards so that the bottom of the Object is resting at ground level. When an Object’s size is displayed, it’s still possible to select and move the Object by clicking or dragging anywhere within the displayed box. Double-clicking anywhere within the size box will also display the Object Manipulation Tool. - Double-click anywhere on the fountain Object and then use the Object Manipulation Tool to change the Fountain Object’s Z position value to 2.5.
Now when the waterfall plays in the deployment, you’ll hear that the upper left and right rear speakers will contribute to the rendering of the waterfall.
You may feel that just changing the water features size doesn’t do enough to transform it from a fountain into a waterfall. You can easily substitute a new audio file that’s more suitable. - Select the Soundset found within the Water Feature Object and in the Sounds area, click the folder icon and select the Waterfall Sound.wav from the Lesson 2 Tutorial folder.
Using Transform
You currently have a waterfall represented as a tall narrow source in the rear of the Scene. If you wanted to reduce its height and stretch its width, you could change it into something more like a small stream flowing across the rear of the Space. Instead of altering the width, length and height, you’ll try a different approach using the Transform section in the Inspector. The Transform tools let you scale and rotate an Object, or even groups of Objects. You’ll learn how Transform can work on groups of Objects in the next lesson, but for now you’ll use Transform on the individual Fountain Object.
- Scroll to the Transform area of the Inspector
You see a section for Scale and another for rotation. To make an Object’s size expand or contract on all 3 axes, you can drag the slider below the X, Y and Z values. In this case you’ll make the fountain larger. - Drag the Scale slider until the X, Y and Z values show a value of 2.0.
Now the water feature is twice as big, but it has the wrong orientation for a flowing stream. You can turn the water feature to run lengthwise using the Pitch, Roll and Yaw values, which are expressed in degrees. You can adjust these values by dragging the small dial to the left of each value. - Experiment with adjusting the Pitch, Roll and Yaw values.
You see how the Object rotates around its center point on each axis.
You can quickly reset the Object back to its default rotation values using the reset button. Use the reset and then change the Roll value to 90 degrees by typing it in. - In the Transform area, Click the Reset button, then double-click the Roll value, enter 90 and press Return.
Now you can see and hear that water feature sound spans the rear of the Aviary Scene.
As you did before, you can substitute a more appropriate sound by simply replacing the referenced audio file. - Select the Soundset found within the Water Feature Object and in the Sounds area, click the folder icon and select the Stream Sound.wav from the Lesson 2 Tutorial folder.
Adjusting Spread
The Acoustic spread parameter determines how far an Object's sound reaches beyond its acoustic size. It ultimately affects how gradually an Object pans between speakers. Lower values result in the sound being more localized to individual speakers, while a higher value will bleed the sound across more speakers. This is similar to the divergence feature found in some conventional surround sound panners.
Acoustic spread can be visualized in the Canvas.
- Click the Show acoustic spread checkbox.
You see another transparent box shaped with rounded corners appear outside the box representing acoustic size.
Give the stream a broader reaching sound by increasing its Acoustic spread. - Increase the Acoustic spread value to 8.
Note: You may have to turn off the inherited property.
In the Canvas, you see the size of the Acoustic spread grow, which will have the result of more speakers in the Space being used to represent the sound.
You may have seen that by default, the Acoustic spread property is inherited from its parent, the Scene root. In this situation, the modification to the Water Feature sound’s Acoustic spread was uniquely set, so it makes sense to keep this change specific to this one Object.
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