Prevent sound from playing through walls

Hi all, would anyone happen to know a way to stop sounds from playing through walls? This is a bit problematic for me, as I have a ventilation shaft making noise on the other side of a wall, and I can hear it through the wall when I go to the other side. From what I've heard, FMOD actually has this functionality, but Unity's implementation of FMOD doesn't.
Suggestions?

 

Sectr Audio

 

Yeah, I've thought about Sectr Audio, but I'd rather not pay 50$ for the fix..

 

Well, then simply raycast from audiosources to the AudioListener( the player in your case ), and modulate volume if your raycast hits a wall.

 

Hey! Author of SECTR AUDIO here. Thanks to those who recommended it.

SECTR Audio supports several different occlusion models, but as gregzo says the simplest thing to do is raycast from source to listener. If you do this you'll probably find that it's too expensive to raycast from every source to the listener every frame. The trick is being able to cast less often and still have smooth sounding audio.

Happy to answer more questions on SECTR audio if you have them

 

Considering the time you'll need to invest to do this cleanly ( ray casting is just the beginning, you'll also need to handle limit cases and transitions ), SECTR AUDIO is a no brainer. It's a very well made tool and does much more than simply modulating volume.

 

Thanks for the replies guys.

As I previously stated, I simply cannot afford to buy Sectr Audio at the moment (I'm a poor student without any income).

And I understand that the raycasting method is difficult to set up properly, especially as I have many objects in the scene, and I don't want audio to stop playing if the ray hits a trashcan. But I think I might have to create some sort of a system myself for this.

 

Alright, so I figured out a way to do this.
Basically I used raycasts to see if there is something blocking the view from the Audio Source to the player. But I also made it so that each object can absorb different amounts of sound. Every time the ray hits an object, it gets its occlusion value and muffles the sound based on that value.

 

Thanks for all reply's, i'll probably check out both suggestions

 

We use Projects acoustics, it's amazing, some examples from our game

 

You can use sound absorbers in the room to prevent sound in other places.

 

I'll do you all one better. Create a box collider for each room you are in and make it an is trigger. In that case, your player can walk through the collider. Use an OnTriggerStay script to determine when the player enters the room. If the player is in the room, the volume is enabled. Otherwise, if the player is outside the room, you mute the volume.

 

This is a terrible necro, but - SECTR now comes only as a complete package for $100.

Is there another solution just for audio occlusion?

 

There is Master Audio, but that's also $99 if you don't own a previous package of theirs. If you want it for cheap you may need to develop it yourself (I mean depending on how much you feel your time worth), it's not that complex. Or move onto Fmod, in the studio you can set the various curves more easily.