I’ve been digging through some previous questions here and have found a couple which I believe could address (or at least touch on) what I am trying to achieve, however, for whatever reason I’m just struggling to get my head around it and could use some help!
What I am trying to achieve is having the reverb wet signal of a 3D event increase with distance, and the dry level decrease. As a result, when the player is at a great enough distance from an event, they will only hear the wet signal of the reverb, not the dry signal of the event, and vice versa.
Now, this is easy to achieve if I have a reverb per event, and just automate the wet/dry signal with distance, but this is obviously ridiculously expensive as every single instance of an event would have to have its own reverb. I want to know how I could achieve this using sends, so there is one shared reverb between all events, yet the reverb signal is panned and matches the 3D location of the event it is processing.
Based on the info I’ve dug out so far, I understand that a signal going into a reverb is folded down to mono first. So how can I get a send to a reverb from an event to maintain the 3D location? I saw in a question (linked below) that we can use a snapshot with automation to achieve something similar, but, as I stated previously my brain can’t seem to process it properly at the moment!
Having the dry signal decrease and the wet signal increase with distance without putting the reverb effect inside the event is trivial: Simply place a send to your project’s reverb return bus to the left of the fader in each event’s master track signal chain, then automate the send and master track volume on the distance parameter.
The nature of reverb processing is that the reverb effect spreads the signal on any given channel across multiple channels. This is because the reverb effect simulates sound bouncing off surfaces located in a variety of directions and at a number of different distances, making the output sound muddier, echo-y, and less directional by design. As a consequence, the direction to the event from the listener is not discernible in a signal processed by a reverb effect, but other 3D based behavior (such as attenuation due to distance) will still function as expected.
You can ensure that an event’s 3D behavior is present in the signal sent to the reverb by placing the send to reverb to the right of the spatializer effect in the event’s master track signal chain.
If you want a sound passing through a reverb to sound like it’s coming from the same direction as another event, there is no easy way to do it, as that’s not how the reverb effect is designed to work. However, you could potentially apply panning to the signal of a reverb bus by using (or automating) the bus panner, or by using a combination of transceiver effects and an event with a spatializer, but be aware that doing so will apply that panning to everything that contributes to that signal.
An earlier version of this answer contained some technical errors. These errors have been corrected. I also added some details about the limited ways in which panning may be applied to a bus.
